Davood Rafiei did his undergrad work at Sharif, his M.Sc. in Waterloo and 
his PhD in Toronto. He joined the University of Alberta in 2000, where he is 
now Professor of Computer Science and member of the Database 
Systems Research Group. Davood has served in the program committees of both
database conferences such as SIGMOD and VLDB and Web conferences such as WWW. 
His areas of interest also span over databases and the Web and include 
integrating natural language text with relational data, Web information 
retrieval and similarity queries and indexing. Davood was a visiting scientist 
at Google (Mountain View) for a year between 2007-2008.