Research Questions: What data structures and algorithms can enable efficient search across both structured and unstructured data? How do we design efficient and easy to use systems for semantic queries?
Yannis Chronis
Assistant Professor
chronis [at] ethz.ch
Dept. of Computer Science
ETH Zurich
About Me
I am an assistant professor of Computer Science
at ETH Zurich, and a Visiting Faculty at
Google. I am a member of the
Systems Group
and an associated faculty at the ETH AI Center. I work on making
access to data efficient, and the systems that provide it robust and easy to use. My research interests
span database systems, computer architecture, AI and their interesections.
Before joining ETH, I spent 3 years at the Systems Research Group at Google. I received my Ph.D. in Computer
Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, advised by Prof. Jignesh Patel.
My PhD focused on HW-SW codesign for makign data processing efficient. My work was generously
supported by a Facebook
Fellowship. I earned a Bachelor's and a Master's Degree on Computer Science from the
University of Athens, Greece, advised by Prof. Yannis Ioannidis.
I am looking for PhD students.
If you are interested in joining my research group send me your CV and transcript of records via email and apply to
ETH
Application System. Note, ETH generally requires a master degree before starting the
PhD program (more information). My current active areas of research are:
Semantic Search: Querying Structured and Unstructured Data +
Next-Gen Database System Design +
Hardware–Software Co-Design for Data Processing +
Research Questions: What core operations should a next-generation data management system support to increase data retrieval quality and overall efficiency? How can database systems serve as the central source of data for multi-step AI-driven and semantic data search pipelines?
Research Questions: How can we design computing platforms that are more efficient for data processing workloads? What are the architectures that maximize throughput, energy efficiency and minimizes latency for data processing? What does the future of compute infrastructure for distributed data processing look like, and how should we balance specialization versus general-purpose? Are GPUs and AI accelerators evolving into the general-purpose data parallel processing hardware of the future?
Publications
Filtered Vector Search: State-of-the-art and Research Challenges
Yannis Chronis, Helena Caminal, Yannis Papakonstantinou, Fatma Özcan, Anastasia Ailamaki
VLDB 2025 Tutorial PDF
Databases in the Era of Memory-Centric Computing
Yannis Chronis, Anastasia Ailamaki, Lawrence Benson, Helena Caminal, Jana Giceva, Dave
Patterson, Eric Sedlar, Lisa Wu Wills
CIDR 2025 PDF
CardBench: A Benchmark for Learned Cardinality Estimation in Relational
Databases
Yannis Chronis, Yawen Yang, Yu Gan, Sami Abu-El-Haija, Chelsea Lin, Carsten Binnig, Fatma
Ozcan
arxiv PDF GitHub
Simple Adaptive Query Processing vs. Learned Query Optimizers: Observations and Analysis
Yunjia Zhang, Yannis Chronis, Jignesh Patel, Theodoros Rekatsinas
VLDB 2023 PDF
PVLDB 2025 PDF
SPA: Economical and Workload-Driven Indexing for Data Analytics in the
Cloud
Peter Boncz, Yannis Chronis, Jan Finis, Stefan Halfpap, Viktor Leis, Thomas Neumann, Anisoara
Nica, Caetano Sauer, Knut Stolze, Marcin Zukowski
ICDE 2023 PDF
Accelerating Database Analytical Query Workloads using an Associative
Processor
Helena Caminal*, Yannis Chronis*, Tianshu Wu, Jignesh M. Patel, José F.
Martínez
ISCA 2022 PDF
How good is my HTAP system?
Elena Milkai, Yannis Chronis, Kevin Gaffney, Zhihan Guo, Jignesh M. Patel, Xiangyao Yu
SIGMOD 2022 PDF
Can Transfer Learning be used to build a Query Optimizer?
Yunjia Zhang, Yannis Chronis, Jignesh Patel, Theodoros Rekatsinas
CIDR 202 PDF
External Merge Sort for Top-K Queries: Eager input filtering guided by
histograms
Yannis Chronis, Thanh Do, Goetz Graefe, Keith Peters
SIGMOD 2020 PDF
Efficiently Searching In-Memory Sorted Arrays: Revenge of the Interpolation
Search?
Peter VanSandt, Yannis Chronis, Jignesh M. Patel
SIGMOD 2019
PDF
Code
Fairness in dataflow scheduling in the cloud
Ilia Pietri, Yannis Chronis, Yannis Ioannidis
Information Systems 2019
PDF
Multi-objective optimization of scheduling dataflows on heterogeneous cloud
resources
Ilia Pietri, Yannis Chronis, Yannis Ioannidis
IEEE Big Data 2017
PDF
A Relational Approach to Complex Dataflows
Yannis Chronis, Yannis Foufoulas, Vaggelis Nikolopoulos, Alexandros Papadopoulos, Lefteris
Stamatogiannakis, Christoforos Svingos, Yannis Ioannidis
Medal @ EDBT 2016 PDF
Teaching
ETH Zurich
[Autumn 2025] Vector Search in Databases for AI Seminar
Universtiy of Wisconsin-Madison
[Spring 2022] CS 564 - Database Management Systems: Design and Implementation
Experience and Awards
Systems Researcher, SRG @
Google, Sunnyvale, USA
2022-2025
Facebook Fellowship Recipient, Blog
Post
2020-2022
Intern, Microsoft
Research and Google
Summer 2017, Summer 2018, Summer 2020
Service
PCSIGMOD, VLDB, VLDBJ, CIDR, DaMoN, MICRO, SOCC
CIDR Proceedings Chair