He graduated from Cornell University, Computer Science Department in 2003 under the supervision of Johannes Gehrke. Throughout his career, Alin's interests shifted from data-mining (subject of his Ph.D thesis) to approximate query processing (sketching, sampling, histograms) and more recently to high-performance database systems. The main theme in Alin's research is the pursuit of linear structure and the process of generalization as the main method to simplify analysis, in the case of theoretical work, or simplify development and design in the case of systems work.