His research goals are to enable insightful monitoring of large streaming datasets, and to facilitate easier declarative construction of scalable systems in novel computing applications. In addition to the talk topics, Yanif's ongoing work includes exploring joint database and compiler-style optimizations for large-scale data processing and analytics, and protein data management for a petabyte-scale molecular and drug design dataset in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Medical School. He received his PhD from Brown University, and has been a postdoctoral associate with the Database Group at Cornell University.