Curriculum Vitae
Contact: afariha [at] cs.utah.edu

I am an Assistant Professor at Kahlert School of Computing, the University of Utah. I co-lead the Data Management Research Center for Human-centered, Efficient, and Scalable Systems. I was a researcher at Microsoft PROSE Research and Engineering team. I obtained my Ph.D. from Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), University of Massachusetts, Amherst under the supervision of Prof. Alexandra Meliou (Ph.D. Dissertation).

I am interested in solving various data-management problems targeted towards boosting usability, explainability, and trustworthiness of data systems. My current focus is on designing mechanisms for enhancing system usability and developing intelligent tools towards boosting productivity for a diverse group of users, ranging from end users to data scientists and developers. My research techniques involve invention of new algorithms and applying theory into practice.

Prospective students

  • PhD Students: I am looking to hire 2-3 PhD students. If you are not yet a U of Utah student, apply and mention my name in your application (do NOT send me emails, just apply through the official portal and I will review your application). To know more, check out my video series about research in Computer Science with a focus on Databases/Data-management research. If you have a good background and interest in algorithms, theory, or competitive programming, you will find good alignment with my research techniques, which require algorithms and theory.
  • Undergrad Students: I am looking for an undergrad student at the U of Utah with an excellent academic record, strong coding skills, and an interest in research to work on the CoWrangler project with UROP funding. Contact me if interested. Include the tag [Prospective Undergrad Student] in your email subject.
  • Masters Students: If you are currently an MS student at the U of Utah and are planning to apply for PhD, and you are interested in doing research with me (via an independent study), email me. Include the tag [Prospective MS Student] in your email subject. Briefly mention your research interest and be technically specific about your plans and project ideas. I do not have any funding available for Masters students, so do not send me emails asking for RA or funding opportunities.
  • Seeking TA positions: If you are interested in TA positions for my course, do NOT email me. Apply to the KSoC TA portal.

Current students


News

Publications

Conference and Workshop papers and demonstrations (peer-reviewed)
  1. Whanhee Cho, Anna Fariha:
    UTOPIA: Automatic Pivot Table Assistant. [Demo]
    VLDB (2024)
  2. Zifan Liu, Shaleen Deep, Anna Fariha, Fotis Psallidas, Ashish Tiwari, Avrilia Floratou:
    Rapidash: Efficient Detection of Constraint Violations.
    VLDB (2024)
  3. Anjali Singh, Anna Fariha, Christopher Brooks, Gustavo Soares, Austin Henley, Ashish Tiwari, Chethan M, Heeryung Choi, Sumit Gulwani:
    Investigating Student Mistakes in Introductory Data Science Programming.
    SIGCSE (2024)
  4. Bhavya Chopra, Anna Fariha, Sumit Gulwani, Austin Z. Henley, Daniel Perelman, Mohammad Raza, Sherry Shi, Danny Simmons, Ashish Tiwari:
    CoWrangler: Recommender System for Data-Wrangling Scripts. [Demo]
    SIGMOD (2023)
  5. Rohan Bavishi, Harshit Joshi, José Pablo Cambronero Sánchez, Anna Fariha, Sumit Gulwani, Vu Le, Ivan Radiček, Ashish Tiwari:
    Neurosymbolic Repair for Low-Code Formula Languages.
    OOPSLA (2022)
  6. Sainyam Galhotra, Anna Fariha, Raoni Lourenço, Juliana Freire, Alexandra Meliou, Divesh Srivastava:
    DataPrism: Exposing Disconnect between Data and Systems
    SIGMOD (2022)
  7. Maliha Tashfia Islam, Anna Fariha, Alexandra Meliou, Babak Salimi:
    Through the Data Management Lens: Experimental Analysis and Evaluation of Fair Classification
    SIGMOD (2022)
  8. El Kindi Rezig, Anshul Bhandari, Anna Fariha, Benjamin Price, Allan Vanterpool, Andrew Bowne, Lindsey McEvoy, Vijay Gadepally:
    Examples are All You Need: Iterative Data Discovery by Example in Data Lakes [Abstract]
    CIDR (2022)
  9. Nishant Yadav*, Matteo Brucato*, Anna Fariha*, Oscar Youngquist, Julian Killingback, Alexandra Meliou, Peter J. Haas:
    SubSumE: A Dataset for Subjective Summary Extraction from Wikipedia Documents. [Workshop paper]
    NewSum@EMNLP (2021)
  10. El Kindi Rezig, Anshul Bhandari, Anna Fariha, Benjamin Price, Allan Vanterpool, Vijay Gadepally, Michael Stonebraker:
    DICE: Data Discovery by Example. [Demo]
    VLDB (2021)
  11. Anna Fariha, Ashish Tiwari, Alexandra Meliou, Arjun Radhakrishna, Sumit Gulwani:
    CoCo: Interactive Exploration of Conformance Constraints for Data Understanding and Data Cleaning. [Demo]
    SIGMOD (2021)
  12. Anna Fariha*, Ashish Tiwari*, Arjun Radhakrishna, Sumit Gulwani, Alexandra Meliou:
    Conformance Constraint Discovery: Measuring Trust in Data-Driven Systems.
    SIGMOD (2021)
  13. Anna Fariha, Ashish Tiwari, Arjun Radhakrishna, Sumit Gulwani:
    ExTuNe: Explaining Tuple Non-conformance. [Demo]
    SIGMOD (2020)
  14. Anna Fariha, Suman Nath, Alexandra Meliou:
    Causality-Guided Adaptive Interventional Debugging.
    SIGMOD (2020)
  15. Anna Fariha, Matteo Brucato, Peter J. Haas, Alexandra Meliou:
    SuDocu: Summarizing Documents by Example. [Demo]
    VLDB (2020)
  16. Anna Fariha, Alexandra Meliou:
    Example-Driven Query Intent Discovery: Abductive Reasoning using Semantic Similarity.
    VLDB (2019)
  17. Anna Fariha, Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar, Alexandra Meliou:
    SQuID: Semantic Similarity-Aware Query Intent Discovery. [Demo]
    SIGMOD (2018)
Other Publications
Technical reports
  • Shiyi He, Alexandra Meliou, Anna Fariha:
    ChARLES: Change-Aware Recovery of Latent Evolution Semantics in Relational Data.
    CoRR abs/2409.18386 (2024)
  • Rania Saber, Anna Fariha:
    Formative Study for AI-assisted Data Visualization.
    CoRR abs/2409.06892 (2024)
  • Yuqing Wang, Anna Fariha:
    Development of Data Evaluation Benchmark for Data Wrangling Recommendation System.
    CoRR abs/2409.10635 (2024)
  • Bhavya Chopra, Ananya Singha, Anna Fariha, Sumit Gulwani, Chris Parnin, Ashish Tiwari, Austin Z. Henley:
    Conversational Challenges in AI-Powered Data Science: Obstacles, Needs, and Design Opportunities.
    CoRR abs/2310.16164 (2023)
  • Zifan Liu, Shaleen Deep, Anna Fariha, Fotis Psallidas, Ashish Tiwari, Avrilia Floratou:
    Rapidash: Efficient Constraint Discovery via Rapid Verification.
    CoRR abs/2309.12436 (2023)
  • Rohan Bavishi, Harshit Joshi, José Pablo Cambronero Sánchez, Anna Fariha, Sumit Gulwani, Vu Le, Ivan Radiček, Ashish Tiwari:
    Neurosymbolic Repair for Low-Code Formula Languages.
    CoRR abs/2207.11765 (2022)
  • Anna Fariha:
    Enhancing Usability and Explainability of Data Systems. Ph.D. Dissertation.
    Doctoral Dissertations, University of Massachusetts Amherst (2021)
  • Sainyam Galhotra, Anna Fariha, Raoni Lourenço, Juliana Freire, Alexandra Meliou, Divesh Srivastava:
    DataExposer: Exposing Disconnect between Data and Systems.
    CoRR abs/2105.06058 (2021)
  • Maliha Tashfia Islam, Anna Fariha, Alexandra Meliou:
    Through the Data Management Lens: Experimental Analysis and Evaluation of Fair Classification.
    CoRR abs/2101.07361 (2021)
  • Anna Fariha, Lucy Cousins, Narges Mahyar, Alexandra Meliou:
    Example-Driven User Intent Discovery: Empowering Users to Cross the SQL Barrier Through Query by Example.
    CoRR abs/2012.14800 (2020)
  • Anna Fariha, Ashish Tiwari, Arjun Radhakrishna, Sumit Gulwani, Alexandra Meliou:
    Conformance Constraint Discovery: Measuring Trust in Data-Driven Systems.
    CoRR abs/2003.01289 (2020)
  • Anna Fariha, Suman Nath, Alexandra Meliou:
    Causality-Guided Adaptive Interventional Debugging.
    CoRR abs/2003.09539 (2020)
  • Anna Fariha, Alexandra Meliou:
    Example-Driven Query Intent Discovery: Abductive Reasoning using Semantic Similarity.
    CoRR abs/1906.10322 (2019)
Undergraduate and masters research
  • Anna Fariha, Chowdhury Farhan Ahmed, Carson K. Leung, Md. Samiullah, Suraiya Pervin, Longbing Cao:
    A New Framework for Mining Frequent Interaction Patterns from Meeting Databases.
    Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence (2015)
  • Amit Mandal, Mehedi Hasan, Anna Fariha, Chowdhury Farhan Ahmed:
    GSCS - Graph Stream Classification with Side Information.
    APWeb (2015)
  • Quazi Marufur Rahman, Anna Fariha, Amit Mandal, Chowdhury Farhan Ahmed, Carson K. Leung:
    A Sliding Window-Based Algorithm for Detecting Leaders from Social Network Action Streams.
    WI-IAT (2015)
  • Shafaet Ashraf, Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar, Md. Abeed Hassan, Saifuddin Md. Tareeq, Anna Fariha:
    An Efficient Method for Extracting Subtrees Against Forest Query.
    IMCOM (2015)
  • Md. Samiullah, Chowdhury Farhan Ahmed, Anna Fariha, Akiz Uddin Ahmed:
    Efficient Graph Classification in Shifted Datasets Using Weighted Correlated Feature Selection.
    LMCE@ECML-PKDD (2014)
  • Md. Samiullah, Chowdhury Farhan Ahmed, Anna Fariha, Md. Rafiqul Islam, Nicolas Lachiche:
    Mining Frequent Correlated Graphs with a New Measure.
    Expert System with Applications (2014)
  • Md. Samiullah, Chowdhury Farhan Ahmed, Manziba Akanda Nishi, Anna Fariha, S. M. Abdullah, Md. Rafiqul Islam:
    Correlation Mining in Graph Databases with a New Measure.
    APWeb (2013)
  • Anna Fariha, Chowdhury Farhan Ahmed, Carson Kai-Sang Leung, S. M. Abdullah, Longbing Cao:
    Mining Frequent Patterns from Human Interactions in Meetings Using Directed Acyclic Graphs.
    PAKDD (2013)
  • Anna Fariha, Shariful Islam, Chowdhury Farhan Ahmed, Byeong-Soo Jeong:
    An Algorithm towards Indexing Evolving Graph Databases.
    GSTF Journal on Computing (2012)
  • Shariful Islam, Anna Fariha, Chowdhury Farhan Ahmed, Byeong-Soo Jeong:
    EGDIM: Evolving Graph Database Indexing Method.
    ICUIMC (2012)

Teaching