Generative AI is disrupting data management on multiple levels. It enables us to query structured and unstructured data uniformly, while simultaneously democratizing data access through natural language interfaces to querying. Beyond that, AI enables us to substantially reimagine the complexity of questions we can ask from collections of data and the scope of decisions that data can support. In this talk I will discuss several projects that advance the agenda of agent-driven data-management systems. These projects share a common challenge: designing and understanding the boundary of control between the human and the AI in future data-management systems.
Bio: Alon Halevy is a Distinguished Engineer at Google, where he works on extending data management with GenAI. From 2019 until November 2023, he was a director at Meta’s Reality Labs Research, where he worked on Personal Digital Data, the combination of neural and symbolic techniques for data management and Human Value Alignment. Prior to Meta, Alon was the CEO of Megagon Labs (2015-2018) and led the Structured Data Group at Google Research (2005-2015), where the team developed WebTables and Google Fusion Tables. From 1998 to 2005 he was a professor at the University of Washington, where he founded the database group. Alon is a founder of two startups, Nimble Technology and Transformic (acquired by Google in 2005). Alon co-authored three books: The AI Partner (2026), The Infinite Emotions of Coffee and Principles of Data Integration. In 2021 he received the Edgar F. Codd SIGMOD Innovations Award. Alon is a Fellow of the ACM and a recipient of the PECASE award and Sloan Fellowship. Together with his co-authors, he received VLDB 10-year best paper awards for the 2008 paper on WebTables and for the 1996 paper on the Information Manifold data integration system. Alon received his bachelor’s degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and his Ph.D from Stanford University.