Sourav S Bhowmick is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering (SCSE), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is the Program Director of the Master of Science in Data Science (MSDS) program in NTU and the founder of the Data Management Research Group at NTU (DANTE). He holds/has held visiting faculty positions at MIT, Fudan University, Xidian University, and Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU).
Sourav's core research expertise is in data management, human-data interaction, and data analytics. His research interests are user-centric, multi-area and multi-disciplinary in flavor, focusing primarily on developing novel paradigms, algorithms, and technology to improve efficiency, scalability, fairness, or usability of data-centric software. His research has appeared in premium venues such as ACM SIGMOD, VLDB, ACM WWW, ACM MM, ACM SIGIR, ACM BCB, VLDB Journal, and Bioinformatics. In addition to novel contributions in classical data management and analytics, Sourav pioneered several non-traditional paradigms and techniques such as bridging data management and HCI (human-data interaction) to build usable and high performance visual querying systems, bridging social psychology and online social influence towards more realistic representation of the social space, bridging database education and technology, mining structural evolution of complex-structured data, and data-driven conflict of interest (COI) management in peer-reviewed venues for fairer review process. His views on human-data interaction and review fairness can be found in 2021 SIGMOD Record (Distinguished Profiles column) interview. In particular, some of his research have led to the following systems that have been used in practice by end users:
Sourav's work on influence maximization in competitive networks received Best Paper Award Nomination in ACM SIGMOD 2015. He is co-recipient of Best Paper Awards in ACM CIKM 2004, ACM BCB 2011, and VLDB 2021 for work on mining structural evolution of tree-structured data, generating functional summaries, and scalable attributed network embedding, respectively. He is also co-recipient of the 2022 ACM SIGMOD Research Highlights Award. Sourav has served/serving as a program chair/co-chair of several international conferences such as EDBT 2023, CODS-COMAD 2022, ACM CIKM 2020, IEEE BigComp 2018, DASFAA 2014, DEXA 2009 and 2008. He has also served/serving as Group Leader/Associate Editor/Area Chair for VLDB, SIGMOD, ICDE, and DASFAA. Sourav is/was a member of the editorial boards of several international journals (e.g., IEEE TKDE, SIGMOD Record). He is serving as a member of the SIGMOD Executive Committee (2021-2025), a regular member of the PVLDB advisory board (2021-2023), and a co-lead in the committee for Diversity and Inclusion in Database Conference Venues. Sourav is a co-recipient of the VLDB Service Award in 2018 from the VLDB Endowment for his contribution in designing an efficient PVLDB proceedings management framework. He was conferred Distinguished Reviewer Award for "outstanding services to VLDB 2020 and data management community" and in VLDB 2023. He also received the Distinguished Associate Editor Award in ACM SIGMOD 2021, 2023, and VLDB 2022. He received the 2022 SCSE Faculty Award for leadership and contributions to SCSE. Sourav was inducted into Distinguished Members of the ACM in 2020 for "outstanding scientific contributions to computing". He is a passionate educator and was Nominated for the Excellence in Teaching Award in 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2020. Sourav is an avid visual artist.