Jeff Tao
A selfie of me in a courtyard at Penn

Hi, I’m Jeff! I’m currently a second-year PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania where I’m advised by Professors Andrew Head and Ryan Marcus.

Previously, I was an MS Thesis student at Columbia University where I worked on systems to support data visualization interfaces, advised by Professor Eugene Wu.

In a past life, I worked as a senior full-stack software engineer at MongoDB and Microsoft.

News

  • [2025.01] BayesQO was accepted to SIGMOD 2025!
  • [2025.01] FreeForm was accepted to CHI 2025!
  • [2024.05] I’m at NEDB Day 2024 presenting our work on Bayesian Query Super-Optimization

Publications

Learned Offline Query Planning via Bayesian Optimization
Jeffrey Tao, Natalie Maus, Haydn Jones, Yimeng Zeng, Jacob R. Gardner, Ryan Marcus
SIGMOD 2025

Physical Visualization Design: Decoupling Interface and System Design
Yiru Chen, Xupeng Li, Jeffrey Tao, Lana Ramjit, Ravi Netravali, Subrata Mitra, Aditya Parameswaran, Javad Ghaderi, Dan Rubenstein, Eugene Wu
SIGMOD 2025

FreeForm: Flexibly Augmenting Formulas with Synchronized Markup and Graphical Edits
Jeffrey Tao, Litao Yan, Jessica Shi, Mia Ginsberg, Andrew Head
CHI 2025

Tyche: Making Sense of Property-Based Testing Effectiveness
Harrison Goldstein, Jeffrey Tao, Zac Hatfield-Dodds, Benjamin C. Pierce, Andrew Head
UIST 2024

DIG: The Data Interface Grammar
Yiru Chen, Jeffrey Tao, Eugene Wu
HILDA 2023

Demonstration of PI2: Interactive Visualization Interface Generation for SQL Analysis in Notebook
Jeffrey Tao, Yiru Chen, Eugene Wu
SIGMOD 2022

XRP: In-Kernel Storage Functions with eBPF
Yuhong Zhong, Haoyu Li, Yu Jian Wu, Ioannis Zarkadas, Jeffrey Tao, Evan Mesterhazy, Michael Makris, Junfeng Yang, Amy Tai, Ryan Stutsman, Asaf Cidon
OSDI 2022
Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award

Projects

In my spare time, I also maintain some side projects: