Sajjadur Rahman
444 Castro St, Mountain View, CA 94041

I am a Research Manager and Senior Research Scientist at Megagon Labs where I am leading the Data-AI Symbiosis (DAIS) group. I received my PhD from CS@Illinois where I worked with Aditya Parameswaran. Before that, I was a lecturer at Department of CSE, BUET.

My research synthesizes techniques from data management, AI, and HCI to build scalable, explainable, and responsible systems for data discovery, data integration, and information retrieval. My current research focuses on building a data platform for multi-agent systems while prioritizing aspects such as fact checking and verification, text-2-DSL querying, integrating information within data lakes, and data lakes usability. My research has been published in premier conferences in Databases (SIGMOD and VLDB), HCI (CHI and CSCW), and NLP (EMNLP and NAACL.) I collaborated on research projects that were recognized with the best demo award (at ICDE) and featured in popular tech blogs. My research enabled scalable data exploration in open-source tools (e.g., DataSpread), and enjoyed adoption in the industry (e.g., a planning tool for creative design at the startup B12.) I was the Program Chair of the MATCHING workshop at ACL 2023 and served on the program committee of SIGMOD, VLDB, EMNLP, and IEEE ISSRE.

News

  • Demo on "Human-LLM Collaborative Annotation System" accepted at EACL'24.
    January 22, 2024
  • Paper on "Human-LLM Collaborative Annotation Through Effective Verification" accepted at CHI'24.
    January 18, 2024
  • Received recognition for outstanding review at CHI 2024.
    November 15, 2023
  • Became a Research Manager of the DAIS group to lead our efforts in building data platforms for multi-agent systems.
    November 01, 2023
  • Organized the MATCHING Workshop@ACL'23.
    July 13, 2023
  • Demo on "Interactive Text Exploration Widgets" accepted at WWW'23.
    March 6, 2023
  • Paper on "Redesigning Interactive Widgets in Computational Notebooks" accepted at CHI'23 as a Late-Breaking Work.
    February 25, 2023
  • Delivered a talk at UCLIC research seminar.
    February 15, 2023

Selected Projects

Human-in-the-loop information extraction

Characterizing Human-in-the-loop information extraction workflows

We observed that data science workers follow an iterative task model consisting of information foraging and sensemaking loops across all the phases of an information extraction workflow. We found several limitations in both loops stemming from a lack of adherence to existing cognitive engineering principles.

Towards Visual Interactive Text Analysis

Towards Visual Interactive Text Analysis

Leam is an interactive tool for text data analysis that, backed by a visual text algebra, combines the strengths of spreadsheets, computational notebooks, and visualizations libraries. The visual text algebra supports a number of text analysis and visualization operations.

Progressive Visualization with Incvisage

Incvisage

IncVisage is a progressive visualization tool that reveals “salient” features of a visualization quickly while minimizing error, enabling rapid and error-free decision making. The approach is orders of magnitude faster than the traditional visualization systems.

Selected Publications

Synergistic Activities

2024    VLDB 2024 (PC), SIGMOD 2025 (PC), NLP4HR@EACL 2024 (Reviewer)
2023    MATHCING@ACL 2023 (Program Chair), MATHCING@ACL 2023 (Panel Moderator), ACL 2023 (PC), EMNLP 2023 (PC), BLP@EMNLP 2023 (PC), SIGMOD 2023 (Demo PC), BigVIS 2023 (PC), CHI 2023 (Reviewer)
2022    EMNLP 2022 (PC), DaSH@EMNLP 2022 (PC), ISSRE 2022 (Industry PC), BigVIS 2022 (PC), WIT@ACL (PC), CHI 2022 (Reviewer)
2021    SIGMOD 2022 (PC), VLDB 2021 (Panelist), BigVIS 2021 (PC), WIT@KDD (PC), CHI 2021 (Reviewer)
2020    SIGMOD 2021 (PC)
2019    VLDB 2019 (Demo, external reviewer)
2018    IIT 2018 (PC)

Papers by Research Themes