Raghu Ramakrishnan
Raghu Ramakrishnan is a database researcher whose work spans scalable data mining algorithms and large-scale cloud data platforms such as Azure Data Lake. After a degree at IIT Madras in 1983 and a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin in 1987, he was a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison until 2006, where he led the CORAL deductive system project and wrote the textbook Database Management Systems. He founded QUIQ in 1999, was elected an ACM Fellow in 2001, served as Chief Scientist at Yahoo! from 2006 to 2012, and won the ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award in 2008 for scaling data mining algorithms to large datasets. At Microsoft, which he joined in 2012, he led the development of Azure Data Lake and received the 2018 SIGMOD Codd Innovations Award. He is CTO for Data and a Technical Fellow at Microsoft, and in a 2024 Berkeley talk he argued that aggregating all relevant data is the key to unlocking generative AI.
Timeline
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1983–2006
Professor at Wisconsin
He earns a B.Tech. from IIT Madras in 1983 and a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 1987. From 1987 to 2006 he is a professor in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he writes the textbook Database Management Systems. He leads the CORAL project, which develops and distributes the CORAL deductive system.
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1999–2003
Founding QUIQ
He founds QUIQ in 1999, a company that offers crowd-sourced question-answering as a cloud service. He serves as its Chairman and CTO until Kanisa acquires QUIQ in 2003.
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2001
Elected ACM Fellow
The Association for Computing Machinery elects him a Fellow in 2001.
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2006–2012
Chief Scientist at Yahoo!
He joins Yahoo! as a Yahoo! Fellow in 2006 and serves as Chief Scientist for its Audience (portal), Cloud and Search divisions. His work there covers the CORE content recommendation algorithms, the PNUTS cloud data stores and semantic search.
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2008
A SIGKDD Innovation Award
He wins the ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award in 2008 for research on scaling data mining algorithms to large datasets and on mining ordered and streaming data. His BIRCH clustering algorithm introduces the cluster feature, a concise summary of a cluster that later clustering algorithms reuse. He also becomes a Fellow of the IEEE in 2008.
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2012
Azure Data Lake at Microsoft
He joins Microsoft in 2012 as a Technical Fellow and CTO, Information Services, and heads the Cloud and Information Services Lab (CISL) with members in Redmond and Mountain View. He leads the development of Azure Data Lake, Microsoft's exabyte-scale storage and analytics platform.
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2018
The Codd Innovations Award
He receives the 2018 ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award for his work on deductive databases and their application to relational databases in practice.
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As of October 2026
CTO for Data at Microsoft
In April 2024 he gives a Sky Seminar at UC Berkeley titled "Open Lakes, Converged Platforms: Data Foundations for the Era of AI", where he argues that aggregating all relevant data is the key to unlocking generative AI for enterprises. He is CTO for Data and a Technical Fellow at Microsoft.
Career
- Since 2012MicrosoftCTO, Information Services
- 2006–2012YahooYahoo! Fellow, Chief Scientist
- 1999–2003QUIQFounder, Chairman and CTO
- 1989–2006University of Wisconsin System
- 1987–2006University of Wisconsin–MadisonProfessor
Education
- 1987University of Texas at AustinPhD
- 1983IIT MadrasB.Tech.
Most-cited works
Colleagues
Sources and credits
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- Raghu Ramakrishnan's UW-Madison Home Page
- Raghu Ramakrishnan - Wikipedia
- Raghu Ramakrishnan, CTO for Data, Microsoft
- Raghu Ramakrishnan - VideoLectures.NET
- ACM SIGKDD 2008 Innovation Award to Raghu Ramakrishnan (KDnuggets News 08:15)
- Raghu Ramakrishnan — 2018 SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award
- Sky Seminar Series: Raghu Ramakrishnan (Microsoft) – Open Lakes, Converged Platforms: Data Foundations for the Era of AI
- Raghu Ramakrishnan | Author at Microsoft Fabric Blog