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

Feb 23, 2026 Thrilled to share that our paper “Novel Table Search” has been accepted to the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering 2026.
Feb 15, 2026 I’m serving as Program Co-Chair for the 26th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering (DocEng 2026).
Oct 08, 2025 I presented our work, Supporting Updates in Information Extraction Pipelines at the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
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.”

selected publications

  1. viewMaintain.jpg
    Autonomously Computable Information Extraction
    Besat Kassaie, and Frank Wm. Tompa
    Proc. VLDB Endow., 2023
  2. DocEng2025Math.gif
    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