Next-Gen Data Infrastructure for Enterprise Generative AI
Essam Mansour - Concordia University
Sept. 19, 2025, 2:49 p.m. - Sept. 15, 2025, 3:30 p.m.
ENGMD 279
Hosted by: Oana Balmau
This talk reflects on my five-year journey advancing data infrastructure, Knowledge Graphs (KGs), and data science automation for AI-based systems. I built an AI-enabled KG engine that bridges Graph DBs and Graph ML frameworks, introducing new training and inference accelerators. I also developed an LLM-powered chatbot platform for KGs that improves domain-specific question answering through advanced linking and understanding tasks. My work on semantic abstraction and KG-powered automation with graph neural networks further pushed data science automation. These efforts produced around 12 top-tier publications (SIGMOD, PVLDB, ICDE, EMNLP, CCS) and several open-source systems, supported by collaborations with Google, IBM, RBC, NBC, and the National Research Council Canada.
I will also share my vision for generative AI in enterprise settings. Our recent work shows how LLMs can be embedded into data infrastructure as a “brain-partner” to support benchmark creators, data scientists, and security analysts. These examples demonstrate the industry impact of LLMs and point to how they could reshape next-gen data infrastructure for domain-specific intelligence. I will close with a forward-looking view on the role of generative AI in enterprise systems and its broader implications.
Dr. Essam Mansour is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Concordia University in Montreal and the head of the Cognitive Data Science lab (CoDS). Over the past decade, he has led pioneering research in AI for databases, AI infrastructure optimization, knowledge graphs (KGs), large language models (LLMs), graph neural networks, and distributed/parallel data systems. In the last five years, Dr. Mansour has developed a promising research program incorporating AI into federated and heterogeneous data infrastructure. This program has achieved significant milestones, securing over $1.1M in federal and industry funding and forming strategic research projects with industry leaders, such as Google, IBM, RBC, and National Bank of Canada (NBC). His group is developing AI-powered systems optimized for scalability on supercomputers and cloud platforms. His research has resulted in over 30 publications in top-tier conferences and journals, including SIGMOD, PVLDB, and ICDE. Dr. Mansour is a regular reviewer for prestigious journals such as ACM TODS, VLDB Journal, and IEEE TKDE, and has served on the program committees of PVLDB, SIGMOD, and ICDE. Dr. Mansour is General Chair of IEEE ICDE 2026 in Montreal and received Distinguished Reviewer Awards at SIGMOD 2025 and VLDB 2018.
