Besat Kassaie

Data Systems Group, David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo

prof_pic.jpg

200 University Avenue West

Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1 Canada

I am a postdoctoral researcher, supervised by Prof. Renée Miller, and a member of the Data Systems Group at the University of Waterloo.

My research interests primarily focus on data systems. I am particularly interested in challenges related to data intelligence, information extraction, unstructured data quality, and information retrieval.

I hold a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, where my thesis, supervised by Prof. Frank Tompa, introduced and addressed the problem of updatability in document databases.

news

Sep 11, 2025 Our paper Exploiting Query Reformulation and Reciprocal Rank Fusion in Math-Aware Search Engines received the Best Paper Award at ACM DocEng 2025. This achievement was made possible through a collaborative effort with Prof. Frank Tompa and Dr. Andrew Kane.
Dec 12, 2024 I presented our latest results on Updatable Extracted Views and their application to improving unstructured data quality at Ontario Database Day. This work was a collaborative effort with Prof. Frank Tompa.”
Sep 01, 2024 I have started working as a postdoctoral researcher, focusing on data intelligence.
Sep 01, 2024 I am excited that I have been selected to mentor a team of three computer science undergraduate students on their very first research project as part of the Early Undergraduate Research Experience Program (EREP) at the University of Waterloo.
Jan 01, 2024 I am excited to announce that I have started a visiting research position to work on a math retrieval project alongside Frank Tompa and Andrew Kane at the University of Waterloo.

selected publications

  1. viewMaintain.jpg
    Autonomously Computable Information Extraction
    Besat Kassaie, and Frank Wm. Tompa
    Proc. VLDB Endow., 2023
  2. Exploiting Query Reformulation and Reciprocal Rank Fusion in Math-Aware Search Engines
    Besat Kassaie, Andrew Kane, and Frank Wm Tompa
    In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, 2025
  3. update.gif
    Update-Aware Information Extraction
    Besat Kassaie
    The Cheriton School of Computer Science, 2023
  4. DBLPjournalshealthKassaieIT22.jpg
    Computer-Assisted Cohort Identification in Practice
    Besat Kassaie, Elizabeth L. Irving, and Frank Wm. Tompa
    ACM Trans. Comput. Heal., 2022
  5. DBLPconfdocengKassaieT19.gif
    Predictable and Consistent Information Extraction
    Besat Kassaie, and Frank Wm. Tompa
    In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering 2019, Berlin, Germany, September 23-26, 2019, 2019