We are a CS research lab led by Shreya Shankar, moving to Carnegie Mellon University in 2027. Our goal is to bring AI into databases and business intelligence (BI) tools. We take a user-centered and full-stack approach — we talk to people and build open-source data systems and user interfaces.
We have three projects going on:
- DocETL, an agentic map-reduce system for processing large unstructured datasets with LLMs (with our friends at the EPIC Data Lab at UC Berkeley).
- Quail, an execution engine for AI functions in SQL (and DocETL), with open source LLMs. The goal is to KV-cache-hitmaxx and throughputmaxx on GPUs.
- DocWriter, an IDE for AI-assisted writing (or is it human-assisted AI writing?).
Contact: shreyashankar@cmu.edu
We are hiring! We are looking for highly motivated and ambitious database, HCI, or AI researchers. PhD applicants: apply through the CMU CSD or HCII PhD applications. Postdocs, undergrads, and masters students: please reach out with why you want to work with us, your CV, and transcript. Don't write your email with AI, please!
Not a computer scientist? If you have unstructured data analysis needs (e.g., documents, transcripts, reports) but no engineering team to build a solution, we'd love to work with you. Please reach out.
Blog
How to Cost Your AI-Powered Filters
Building an Ultra-High Throughput AI-SQL Engine