Luis Gravano Profile

Luis Gravano

Professor of Computer Science

Luis Gravano is a Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. Luis joined Columbia in 1997. At Google, he was a Senior Research Scientist in 2001 and a Visiting Faculty Researcher in 2018-19. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1997, an M.S. degree from Stanford in 1994, and a B.S. degree from the Escuela Superior Latinoamericana de Informática (ESLAI), Argentina, in 1991.

His research interests are in databases, information retrieval, and web search. Luis has earned an NSF CAREER award and multiple best paper awards, including at the ACM SIGMOD 2006 and IEEE ICDE 2005 conferences, and the ACM SIGMOD 2025 "Test of Time" award. His teaching has also been recognized at Columbia with the "Distinguished Teacher Award" from the Computer Science Department in 2011 and the "Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award" from the Columbia Engineering Alumni Association in 2012.

Research Areas

  • Natural Language Processing and Speech
  • Data Management
  • Software Systems
  • Generative AI & Large Language Models (LLMs)
  • Information Retrieval & Web Search

Additional Information

  • Professional Experience
    • July 2013 - Present: Professor. Computer Science Department, Columbia University, New York City, New York
    • July 2002 - June 2013: Associate Professor. Computer Science Department, Columbia University, New York City, New York
    • September 1997 - June 2002: Assistant Professor. Computer Science Department, Columbia University, New York City, New York
    • September 2018 - June 2019: Visiting Faculty Researcher. Google Inc., New York City, New York (on sabbatical from Columbia University)
    • January - August 2001: Senior Research Scientist. Google Inc., Mountain View, California (on leave from Columbia University)
    • August 2000; July 2002: Consulting Researcher. Microsoft Research, Redmond, Washington
    • June - July 2000: Academic Consultant. Google Inc., Mountain View, California
    • July 2000: Consultant. Gigabeat Inc., Palo Alto, California
    • July - August 1999: Visiting Professor. Computer Science Department, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
    • June - July 1999: Consulting Researcher. Microsoft Research, Redmond, Washington
    • 1992 - 1997: Research Assistant. Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, California
    • 1995 - 1996: Research Intern. Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, California
    • 1995: Supplemental Research Associate. IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California
    • July 1994: Instructor. Computer Science Department, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
    • 1993 - 1994: Teaching Assistant. Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, California
    • 1990 - 1992: Resident Researcher. IBM Argentina, Buenos Aires, Argentina
    • 1990 - 1992: Student Visitor. IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California
  • Professional Affiliations
    • Association for Computing Machinery
  • Honors & Awards
    • 2025 ACM SIGMOD "Test of Time" Award, for paper "k-Shape: Efficient and Accurate Clustering of Time Series," by John Paparrizos and Luis Gravano
    • "Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award," Columbia Engineering Alumni Association, Columbia University, 2012
    • "Distinguished Teacher Award," Computer Science Department, Columbia University, 2011
    • "Best Paper" Award, 2006 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2006), 2006
    • "Best Paper" Award, 21st IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2005), 2005
    • "Best Student Paper" Award, 19th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2003), 2003
    • CAREER Award, National Science Foundation (NSF), 1998
    • "Most Original Paper" Award, International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP '92), 1992
  • Education
    • Ph.D., Computer Science, Stanford University
    • M.S., Computer Science, Stanford University
    • B.S., Computer Science ("Licenciatura en Informática"), Escuela Superior Latinoamericana de Informática (ESLAI), Argentina