bio

Denilson Barbosa (he/him/his) is a Professor in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta. He earned a PhD from the University of Toronto in 2005, and since then has worked on data management, knowledge graphs and linked open data, social network analysis, information retrieval and natural language processing. He has co-authored dozens of articles in international conferences and journals in those areas as well as the book Perspectives on Business Intelligence (Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2013).

D. Barbosa was a lead researcher with the Scotiabank Artificial Intelligence Research Initiative at the University of Alberta and a co-PI of LINCS – Linked Open Data for Canadian Cultural Research, a CFI-funded consortium building open knowledge graphs to mobilize cultural and heritage artifacts. Also, he was a co-PI and the Leader of the Data Quality Theme of the NSERC Business Intelligence Network. He has supervised 10 PhD, 19 MSc and 3 post-doctoral fellows who went on to work as faculty members, researchers, or engineers in companies such as Diffbot, Amazon, Intuit, Borealis AI, and Google.

D. Barbosa was the President of the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association (CAIAC) between 2023 and 2024, after serving as Secretary (2018-2021) and Vice-President (2021-2023). He has served as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (2015-2018), Elsevier’s Computational Intelligence Journal (2015-2018), Springer’s Distributed and Parallel Databases (2020-2022), and the SIGMOD Record (2010-2014). He was the ACM SIGMOD Information Director and Web Editor of the Record from 2006 to 2012. He has served on the Program Committee of all major conferences on data management, the Web, and natural language processing, on multiple occasions, and co-chaired the Program Committee of the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics, the 28th Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the 1st and the 2nd ACM SIGMOD Workshops on Databases and Social Networks, the 3rd International Workshop on Data Engineering Meets the Semantic Web, and the 5th International XML Database Symposium (co-located with VLDB 2007).

D. Barbosa is the recipient of an Alberta Ingenuity New Faculty Award, an IBM Faculty Award, the Best Paper Award at the 2010 IEEE Conference on Data Engineering, and supervised the winners of the 2017 TextExt - DBpedia Open Extraction Challenge and the Best Undergraduate Poster Award at the 2012 ACM SIGMOD Conference. He was a Visiting Scientist at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics, Germany (2014-2015), and a Visiting Professor (BIT) at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, in 2008.

Honors

  • Co-supervised the winner of the 2017 TextExt - DBpedia Open Extraction Challenge.
  • Supervised the Best SIGMOD 2012 Undergraduate Research Poster.
  • Best Paper Award - 26th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2010).
  • Department of Computing Science (U. Alberta) Teaching Award, 2009.
  • Visiting researcher at Max-Planck Institute for Informatics, Germany, July 2014 to April 2015.
  • Visiting Professor (BIT) at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, Summer 2008.
  • Alberta Ingenuity New Faculty Award, 2007.
  • IBM Faculty Award, 2006.
  • Visiting faculty at the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies, 2005.
  • Alumnus of the Database Group at the University of Toronto, under the supervision of Alberto Mendelzon, 1999-2004.
  • Recipient of an IBM PhD. Fellowship (2002–2004).