Barzan Mozafari is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research focuses on self-verifying AI systems, self-improving data systems, and cloud optimization and FinOps. Across these areas, he builds systems that verify and improve their own behavior using feedback from users, data, and workloads.
He founded and served as CEO of Keebo, which developed the first autonomous cloud data-warehouse optimization platform and was used by Fortune 100 companies.
His research also led to BlinkDB, which was commercialized through SnappyData before its acquisition by TIBCO. Our CATS algorithm has become the default transaction scheduler in MySQL and Percona Server for MySQL, estimated to be running on hundreds of millions of deployments worldwide. Our earlier VATS algorithm was also adopted as the default transaction scheduler in older versions of MariaDB.
Before joining Michigan, he was a postdoctoral associate at MIT CSAIL and earned his PhD in Computer Science from UCLA. His work has received an NSF CAREER Award, best-paper awards at ACM SIGMOD and EuroSys, and the EuroSys Test-of-Time Award.
