Eleni Tzirita Zacharatou

Associate Professor

Hasso Plattner Institute

Office: F-E.03

August-Bebel-Str. 88

D-14482 Potsdam

eleni.tziritazacharatou@hpi.de

    • News

    [09.2026]
    Visited Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg to serve as discussion leader for Jingyu Liu's Licentiate seminar on adaptive event stream processing, and gave an invited talk on efficient query execution for spatial and streaming data.
    [09.2026]
    I gave my inaugural lecture (Antrittsvorlesung) at HPI! Many thanks to everyone who joined! Recap here.
    [08.2026]
    Three papers accepted at SIGSPATIAL 2026 in Riverside, CA: our research paper "Pierce: GPU Ray Tracing for Spatial Joins over Complex 3D Data", our demo paper "Cross-Platform Spatial Analytics with Apache Wayang", and the vision paper "Envisioning Unified Spatial Benchmarks". Looking forward to November in California!
    [07.2026]
    Heading to HDMS 2026 in Athens to present our work on operator placement (Nova) and spreadsheet parsing (SheetReader). Looking forward to all the interactions with the Greek DB community!
    [04.2026]
    New paper "Benchmarking Spatial Operations over Heterogeneous Data: The Case of Zonal Statistics" accepted at the DBTest 2026 Workshop (co-located with SIGMOD).
    [03.2026]
    Happy to have two contributions at EDBT 2026 in Tampere, Finland: our research paper Nova and our demo paper SheetReader. In addition, I am serving as DEI Co-Chair and Co-Chair of the DOLAP Workshop.
    [03.2026]
    I joined the Hellenic ACM SIGMOD Chapter as Treasurer.
    [03.2026]
    Serving as Senior PC Member (Meta-reviewer) for the Research Track of ICDE 2027.
    [02.2026]
    First invited talk of 2026 at Humboldt University's FONDA Winter Lecture Series, on scalable operator placement for stream processing from edge to cloud.
    [12.2025]
    Wrapping up the year with a pre-Christmas visit and invited talk at EPFL.
    [11.2025]
    I contributed a short reflection to the September issue of SIGMOD Record, as part of the Reminiscences on Influential Papers column (thanks Pinar for the invite!). You can read it here.
    [10.2025]
    Serving on the PC of ACM SIGMOD 2027.
    [09.2025]
    I am very honored to receive the VLDB 2025 Distinguished Reviewer Award.
    [08.2025]
    Looking forward to presenting our work on automated Earth observation pipelines at Big Data from Space (BiDS) 2025 in Latvia!
    [08.2025]
    This month's reviewing activity: SIGSPATIAL PhD and Graduate Studies Workshop & SRC
    [07.2025]
    My manuscript "GPU Rasterization for Spatial Aggregate Join Queries" has been accepted for publication in the third edition of the Encyclopedia of GIS. Looking forward to seeing it in print soon!
    [07.2025]
    New paper "GPU-Accelerated Stochastic Gradient Descent for Scalable Operator Placement in Geo-Distributed Streaming Systems" accepted at the ADMS 2025 Workshop (co-located with VLDB).
    [06.2025]
    Visited Snowflake in Berlin to present an overview of past and current research—great environment and insightful exchanges with Snowflake engineers.
    [06.2025]
    Excited to be speaking at the Soapbox Science Event in Berlin, an open-air scientific showcase.
    [03.2025]
    Just wrapped up a week in beautiful Barcelona at EDBT! I had the opportunity to give the talk, "Efficient Aggregation in a Heterogeneous World," at Huawei's "Next-Generation Data Management Systems" event. Beyond research, I also led the conference's DEI activities, including chairing an engaging DEI panel.
    [03.2025]
    🌟 Exciting news! I have joined the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) and the University of Potsdam as an Associate Professor (W2, tenure track). I will be leading the Spatial Analytics and Large-Scale Data Processing group. Here you can read the press release. Looking forward to the new opportunities ahead!
    [02.2025]
    Excited to serve as Program Co-chair for HDMS 2025! We warmly welcome all members of the Greek database community to submit their work and join us in the beautiful city of Ioannina.
    [01.2025]
    Our paper "Enhancing In-Memory Spatial Indexing with Learned Search" has been accepted at BTW 2025.
    [01.2025]
    New reviewing activity: joined VLDB's 2026 PC.
    [12.2024]
    New paper "Raster Interval Object Approximations for Spatial Intersection Joins" accepted at the VLDB Journal.
    [10.2024]
    I serve as PC member of TDIS 2025 (in conjunction with ACM Eurosys and ACM Asplos).
    [08.2024]
    Attending VLDB 2024 in Guangzhou, China! We will present our research paper "Efficient Placement of Decomposable Aggregation Functions for Stream Processing over Large Geo-Distributed Topologies". I will also participate in a panel on "Success in the Ph.D. Journey" at the VLDB PhD Workshop, and a PhD Mentoring Session. Looking forward to connecting with fellow attendees!
    [07.2024]
    July was the month of academic adventures and exchanges. After visiting BIFOLD to give two talks - one about recent work and one where I shared some advice as an early-career academic - I spent an enriching week in Cluj-Napoca attending the VLDB Summer School and delivering a lecture on Spatial Data Management Systems.
    [05.2024]
    Happy to serve as Diversity and Inclusion chair for one more year at EDBT 2026.
    [04.2024]
    New paper "Analysis of Geospatial Data Loading" accepted at the DBTest 2024 Workshop (in conjunction with SIGMOD).
    [03.2024]
    Our demo paper "Multi-Backend Zonal Statistics Execution with Raven" was accepted at SIGMOD 2024!
    [03.2024]
    I have accepted the invitation to serve as Proceedings co-chair for SIGMOD 2025. Looking forward to collaborating with the organizing board.
    [02.2024]
    Good news! Our paper "Efficient Placement of Decomposable Aggregation Functions for Stream Processing over Large Geo-Distributed Topologies" has been accepted for publication at PVLDB.
    [02.2024]
    I am an invited speaker at the VLDB Summer School 2024. Looking forward to visiting Cluj-Napoca in July. If you are a student, consider applying.
    [01.2024]
    We summarized the discussions and insights from the ICDE'22 panel on Spatial and Temporal Data Management in this article that just appeared on the Data Engineering Bulletin.
    [12.2023]
    Joined both SIGMOD's and VLDB's 2025 PC.
    [11.2023]
    Talking at the HPI-TU Darmstadt Joint Database Systems Seminar was fun.
    [09.2023]
    New preprint available on Arxiv: Enhancing In-Memory Spatial Indexing with Learned Search.
    [09.2023]
    Happy to present my research at the NERDS Seminar.
    [08.2023]
    Martin presented our work on making sketching on FPGAs more resource-efficient at VLDB. Here you can find a recording of his talk. For more details, you can read our paper.
    [08.2023]
    New preprint available on Arxiv: APRIL: Approximating Polygons as Raster Interval Lists.
    [08.2023]
    Happy to become an AI Grid Mentor.
    [07.2023]
    I am honoured to serve as a Diversity and Inclusion Co-chair for EDBT 2025.
    [06.2023]
    I serve as PC Member of ICDE 2024 (Demo track) and LocalRec 2023.
    [04.2023]
    I serve as PC Member of DRAGSTERS 2023.
    [03.2023]
    Looking forward to attend EDBT in Ioannina, Greece, where I will also chair the session on Spatial & Temporal Data Management.
    [03.2023]
    Xenofon Chatziliadis will present our workshop paper at BTW in Dresden.
    [02.2023]
    I am delighted to have served as a member of the PhD thesis committee for Martin Kiefer at TU Berlin. This was my first time being on a thesis committee! Here is a photo with the successful candidate.
    [01.2023]
    Our paper "SheetReader: Efficient Specialized Spreadsheet Parsing" has been accepted for publication in the Information Systems Journal. You can also check out our open source implementation here - it has been downloaded almost 5K times so far.
    [12.2022]
    Good end-of-the-year news! Our paper "Optimistic Data Parallelism for FPGA-Accelerated Sketching" has been accepted for publication at PVLDB.
    [10.2022]
    I serve as PC Member of SIGMOD 2024.
    [09.2022]
    I am very honored to receive the VLDB 2022 Distinguished Reviewer Award.
    [09.2022]
    I will give a talk at the DIREC Seminar 2022, in Aarhus, Denmark.
    [08.2022]
    New paper "Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Stochastic Traffic Speed Imputation" accepted at SIGSPATIAL 2022.
    [07.2022]
    I serve as PC member of BTW 2023 and VLDB PhD Workshop 2023.
    [06.2022]
    New demo paper "Satellite Image Search in AgoraEO" accepted at VLDB 2022. Here you can watch a video of the demo.
    [05.2022]
    New short paper "In-Place Updates in Tree-Encoded Bitmaps" accepted at SSDBM 2022.
    [05.2022]
    Happy to participate in the panel session on Spatial and Temporal Data Management at ICDE 2022.
    [04.2022]
    I serve as PC member of TDIS 2022.
    [03.2022]
    I am thrilled to join the IT University of Copenhagen (ITU) as an Assistant Professor in May 2022.
    [02.2022]
    I serve as PC Member of VLDB 2023.
    [01.2022]
    New paper "Efficient Specialized Spreadsheet Parsing for Data Science" accepted at DOLAP 2022.
    [12.2021]
    I serve as PC Member of SIGMOD 2023.
    [11.2021]
    I serve as Proceeding Chair of DEBS 2022.
    [11.2021]
    I talked at the DataTalksClub podcast about my job as a postdoctoral researcher. Here you can find the link to the podcast.
    [09.2021]
    I gave a talk on "AgoraEO" at the Geo-Information Processing Department of the University of Twente, Netherlands. Here you can watch a recording of the talk.
    [08.2021]
    Happy to participate in the round table session on Spatio-temporal Data System at VLDB 2021.
    [07.2021]
    Very honored to be selected as a BIFOLD Junior Fellow.
    [06.2021]
    I serve as a Reviewer for the VLDB Journal and the Knowledge and Information Systems (KAIS) Journal.
    [06.2021]
    New paper "Monitoring of Stream Processing Engines Beyond the Cloud: an Overview" accepted at VLIoT 2021.
    [05.2021]
    A medium post on our recent work that proposes using distance-bounded spatial approximations to exploit modern hardware and accelerate spatial queries.
    [05.2021]
    New paper "Agora-EO: A Unified Ecosystem for Earth Observation -- A Vision For Boosting EO Data Literacy --" accepted at BiDS 2021.
    [04.2021]
    I serve as PC Member of VLDB 2022, SIGMOD 2022, EDBT 2022, and AIMLSystems 2021.
    [04.2021]
    New paper "GeoBlocks: A Query-Cache Accelerated Data Structure for Spatial Aggregation over Polygons" accepted at EDBT 2021.
    [03.2021]
    New paper "Towards Resilient Data Management for the Internet of Moving Things" accepted at BTW 2021. Here you can watch a recording of the talk.
    [10.2020]
    New paper "The Case for Distance-Bounded Spatial Approximations" accepted at CIDR 2021. Here you can watch a recording of the talk.
    [08.2020]
    I am co-chairing the BOSS 2020 Workshop (co-located with VLDB). Check out our website for videos, slides, and further material on cool open source systems.