Note: I graduated with my PhD in Aug. 2014. My first employer is Google.
I am currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University.
I work in the Database Group with Johannes Gehrke and Alan Demers. I obtained my B.S. in 2009 from Fudan University, Shanghai, China.
I am interested in database systems and cloud computing. In particular, my research focuses on building general optimization frameworks for data intensive applications in public clouds.
Selected Recent Publications
Optimizing Response Time for Distributed Applications in Public Clouds.
Tao Zou. PhD Dissertation.
Joins for Hybrid Warehouses: Exploiting Massive Parallelism in Hadoop and Enterprise Data Warehouses.
Yuanyuan Tian, Tao Zou, Fatma Özcan, Romulo Goncalves, Hamid Pirahesh.
International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT) 2015.
Extended version invited to ACM TODS as Best Papers of EDBT 2015.
ClouDiA: A Deployment Advisor for Public Clouds.
Tao Zou, Ronan Le Bras, Marcos Vaz Salles, Alan Demers, Johannes Gehrke.
International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) 2013.
[  slides pptx | pdf,  poster version for IBM Workshop on Big Data Analytics  ]
Best Paper Award Nominee.
Extended version for VLDBJ Special Issue on Best Papers of VLDB 2013.
Tango: Distributed Data Structures over a Shared Log.
Mahesh Balakrishnan, Dahlia Malkhi, Ted Wobber, Ming Wu, Vijayan Prabhakaran, Michael Wei, John D. Davis, Sriram Rao, Tao Zou, Aviad Zuck.
ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) 2013.
Making Time-stepped Applications Tick in the Cloud.
Tao Zou, Guozhang Wang, Marcos Vaz Salles, David Bindel, Alan Demers, Johannes Gehrke, Walker White.
ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC) 2011.
[  slides pptx | pdf,  release  ]
Teaching Experience
CS5300  | The Architecture of Large - Scale Information Systems |   Spring 2013 |
CS4320(1)  | Introduction to (Practicum in) Database Systems |   Fall 2010 (TA Excellence Award) |
CS1112 | Introduction to Computing Using Matlab   |   Fall 2009 |
Internships
IBM Almaden Research Center   | Mentor: Fatma Özcan and Yuanyuan Tian   | Summer | 2013 |
Microsoft Research Silicon Valley   | Mentor: Mahesh Balakrishnan and Ted Wobber   | Summer | 2012 |
Microsoft Research Redmond   | Mentor: Vivek Narasayya   | Summer | 2011 |
Microsoft Research Asia | Mentor: Jiang-Ming Yang   | Summer | 2009 |
Google Beijing | Mentor: Dong Zhang   | Spring | 2008 |