Avrilia Floratou

About

Avrilia is a Principal Scientist Manager at Microsoft’s Gray Systems Lab (GSL) (opens in new tab). Her research broadly lies in the area of data management with a recent focus on leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve user productivity in domains such as data integration, data exploration and code migration. Her research interests also include semantics-aware data science, large-scale stream processing, benchmarking and performance tuning of Big Data platforms. Previously, she worked on leveraging data semantics and domain knowledge to improve the productivity of data scientists leading to the Semantic Link (opens in new tab) offering in Microsoft Fabric (opens in new tab), Microsoft’s end-to-end, unified analytics platform.  She also worked on the Dhalion (opens in new tab) project, a framework used to define and apply SLO-based policies on long-running applications that has been deployed in various Microsoft services.

Prior to her current role, she was a research scientist at IBM Almaden Research Center working on SQL-on-Hadoop engines and natural language interfaces for databases. Avrilia received her Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Computer Science from University of Wisconsin-Madison working with Prof. Jignesh M. Patel (opens in new tab) and her B.Sc. from University of Athens in Greece.