Gao Cong (丛 高)
Block N4, 2c-103
College of Computing and Data Science
Nanyang Technological University
Email: gaocong at ntu.edu.sg
Biography
2018 -- present: Professor, College of Computing and Data Science (CCDS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Affiliated to the Data Management Research Group (DANTE)
2015 -- 2018: Associate Professor, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
2010 -- 2015: Assistant Professor, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
2008 -- 2010: Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, and Center for Data-intensive Systems (Daisy), Aalborg University, Denmark
2007 -- 2008: Researcher, Microsoft Research Asia
2004 -- 2006: Postdoc Research Fellow, the Database group within the School of Informatics of University of Edinburgh.
2000 -- 2004: Ph.D. student and Pre-doc, Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
1999 -- 2000: ShenZhen Huawei Company, China
1992 -- 1999: Master and Bachelor, Tianjin University, China.
My long CV can be found here.
Research Interests
My research focuses on data management, data mining, and AI-powered data systems, with a particular emphasis on spatial, spatio-temporal, and urban data. In recent years, my work has expanded toward Data Systems for AI and AI for Databases, covering topics such as query plan representation, multimodal data systems, LLM-based query rewriting, ML-enhanced indexing, and data agent systems.
My current research interests include:
Publications (By year and topic)
Selected Awards and Recognition
- ICDE 2026 Distinguished Area Chair Award
- ACM Distinguished Member, 2025
- ACM SIGIR 2025 Test-of-Time Honorable Mention Award for "Time-aware Point-of-Interest Recommendation" (SIGIR 2013)
- Best Paper Runner-Up Award, ACM WSDM 2022
- One of the Best Papers, ACM SIGSPATIAL 2021
- Best Paper Runner-Up Award, ACM WSDM 2020
Selected Recent Invited Talks
- Invited Keynote Talk for APWeb/WAIM 2026
- Invited Keynote Talk "From AI4DB to Databases for AI: Rethinking Data Systems in the LLM Era" for an ICDE'26 workshop
- Invited Keynote Talk "Geospatial entity representation and city foundation models" for IEEE BigComp 2026
- Invited Keynote Talk "Toward City Foundation Models: From Task-Specific Spatial Approaches to Urban General Intelligence" for the LLM+Spatial workshop of VLDB 2025; invited for a perspective paper
- Invited Keynote Talk for a workshop of ICDE 2025
- Invited panel member for ICDE Data+AI panel 2025
- Invited Keynote Talk at SiftDB 2025, China
- Invited Keynote Talk at the 41st CCF National Database Conference (NDBC 2024)
- SIGMOD 2024 Tutorial: Machine Learning for Databases: Foundations, Paradigms, and Open Problems
- Invited Keynote Talk at the 5th International Conference on Spatial Data and Intelligence (SpatialDI 2024): Geospatial entity representation: a step towards city foundation models (Slides)
- Invited Keynote Talk at 2023 Australasian Database Conference (ADC 2023): Empowering Database Systems with Machine Learning (Slides)
Academic Leadership
- Head, Division of Data Science, CCDS, NTU, 2024
- Co-Director, the Singtel Cognitive and Artificial Intelligence Lab for Enterprises (SCALE@NTU), 2019--2024
- Assistant Chair (Alumni and Outreach), School of Computer Science and Computer Engineering, 2018--2024
Our Research Team (members)
Teaching
- Data Analytics and Mining, 2021--now, NTU
- Data Processing Ethics (Mini-Master course), 2021--now, NTU
- Introduction to Databases, 2019--now, NTU
- Information Analytics and Retrieval, 2019--now, NTU
- Database System Principles, 2013--2018, NTU
- Database Systems, 2010--2012, NTU
- Information Retrieval, 2011 (with Jung-jae Kim), NTU
- Natural Language Processing, 2010--2011 (with Jung-jae Kim), NTU
- Algorithms, 2010--2011, NTU
- Data Warehouse and Data Mining, Fall 2008 (with Thomas and Manfred), AAU
- Introduction to Internet Technologies 2008--2009 (with Ken, Man Lung Yiu), AAU
- Database Technology 2008--2009 (with my colleagues), AAU
Professional Services
Editorial Service
- Associate Editor, ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), 2016--present
- Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), 2024--present
Conference Organization
- PC Vice-Chair, ACM SIGSPATIAL 2026
- Tutorial Track Co-Chair, PAKDD 2026
- Tutorial Track Co-Chair, WWW 2024
- PC Co-Chair, ICDE 2022
- Workshop Co-Chair, CIKM 2021
- Associate General Chair, KDD 2021
- Tutorial Track Co-Chair, PAKDD 2020
- PC Co-Chair, ADC 2018
- PC Co-Chair, PhD Forum and Posters Track of ASONAM
- PC Co-Chair, ADMA 2017
- PC Vice-Chair, ICDE 2018
- PC Co-Chair, E&A Track of PVLDB 2014
- Publication Chair, the 25th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC), 2011
Program Committee Service
- Program Committee member for conferences including SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, KDD, SIGSPATIAL, CIKM, etc.