Sepanta Zeighami

Sepanta Zeighami

Postdoctoral Scholar

UC Berkeley

zeighami@berkeley.edu

Advisors

Current Mentees

  • Yourun Sun (undergrad)
  • Andrew Cheng (undergrad)
  • Sasha Singh (undergrad)

Past Mentees

About Me

I'm a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, advised by Aditya Parameswaran. I received my PhD from the University of Southern California, advised by Cyrus Shahabi.

Research. My research broadly focuses on building accurate, reliable, and efficient data and AI systems. These days I'm excited about using AI agents to reliably and efficiently perform high-level data tasks on heterogeneous data (including both structured and unstructured data sources): figuring out what tools they need, ensuring databases support them efficiently, and designing methods to improve their reliability and enable verification.

Impact and Recognition. My work has been deployed in systems such as LlamaIndex and open-source projects such as DocETL, and has inspired optimizations deployed in industry products. My work has received multiple awards and recognitions at various conferences, including an oral presentation at ICML’24 and best paper awards at CHI’26 and MDM’24. I was also selected as a distinguished reviewer for SIGMOD’26.

Service. I regularly review for conferences in my core research areas: databases (SIGMOD, VLDB, etc.) and machine learning conferences (NeurIPS, ICLR, etc.), and sometimes for other related conferences and journals (I've reviewed for PODS, Scientific Reports, FAccT). I'm helping organize the DASHSys workshop at VLDB’26.

Publications

My work primarily appears at data systems and machine learning venues (SIGMOD, VLDB, ICML, ICLR, etc.).
🏆 award · 🚀 industry deployment