Assistant Professor Jiang Wenqi Wins 2026 SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award

Assistant Professor Jiang Wenqi from the Department of Computer Science at NUS Computing has received the 2026 SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award – the most prestigious recognition for early-career researchers in data management. 

The award honours his PhD dissertation, Vector-Centric Machine Learning Systems: A Cross-Stack Approach, completed at ETH Zurich under the supervision of Professors Gustavo Alsonso and Torsten Hoefler. His thesis tackles the efficiency of modern AI systems through a cross-stack approach spanning algorithms, systems, and hardware – achieving substantial improvements in performance, scalability, and cost. The work makes major advances in three areas: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector databases, and recommendation systems. 

Named after Turing Award laureate Jim Gray, the award has been conferred annually since 2006 by ACM SIGMOD, the premier international community for data management research. It recognises a single outstanding PhD dissertation each year, selected from nominations worldwide for technical depth, significance, and potential impact. 

Join us in congratulating Prof Jiang on this well-deserved achievement!