About

Divyakant Agrawal is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he also holds the Leadership Endowed Chair in CS. His research expertise encompasses database systems, distributed computing, data warehousing, and large-scale information systems. Agrawal's research focuses on the design and development of large-scale distributed, scalable, and reliable data management platforms for storing, managing, and analyzing big data. His group has developed innovative storage architectures in the cloud that provide transactional and strong consistency guarantees for managing big data. In the context of big data analytics, he and his collaborators have worked on social networks and social media data, proposing algorithms to limit misinformation campaigns, model user adoption behavior, and report dominant information trends in structural and geographical contexts. His current research activities are centered on developing new approaches for managing geo-replicated data across multiple data centers and ensuring data security and privacy in the cloud. Agrawal has also served as VP of Data Solutions and Advertising Systems at ASK.com, where he was the Chief Architect for next-generation Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing systems and developed revenue-sensitive products using data-mining and machine-learning technologies. Additionally, he is a Visiting Senior Research Scientist at NEC Laboratories of America and has served on various program committees and editorial boards, including the VLDB journal and the Proceedings of the VLDB. Throughout his career, he has published approximately 300 research manuscripts and has maintained a long-standing collaboration with Professor Amr El Abbadi.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Computer Security
• Business
• Database
• Distributed computing
• Data science
• Risk analysis (engineering)

Selected publications

• Permissioned Blockchains: Properties, Techniques and Applications

  Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Management of Data · 2021 · 29 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Security
  • Computer Science

  The unique features of blockchains such as immutability, transparency, provenance, and authenticity have been used by many large-scale data management systems to deploy a wide range of distributed applications including supply chain management, healthcare, and crowdworking in permissioned settings. Unlike permissionless settings, e.g., Bitcoin, where the network is public, and anyone can participate without a specific identity, a permissioned blockchain system consists of a set of known, identified nodes that might not fully trust each other. While the characteristics of permissioned blockchains are appealing to a wide range of largescale data management systems, these systems, have to satisfy four main requirements: confidentiality, verifiability, performance, and scalability. Various approaches have been developed in industry and academia to satisfy these requirements with varying assumptions and costs. The focus of this tutorial is on presenting many of these techniques while highlighting the trade-offs among them. We demonstrate the practicality of such techniques in real-life by presenting three different applications, i.e., supply chain management, large-scale databases, and multi-platform crowdworking environments, and show how those techniques can be utilized to meet the requirements of such applications.

  DOI

Recent grants

• CSR: Small: Data on the Edge: Leveraging Edge Datacenters for Low-latency, Fault-tolerant, mobile Geo-replicated Transactional Data Stores

  NSF · $250k · 2018–2021

• III:Small:Transactional Data Stores in the Cloud

  NSF · $515k · 2010–2016

• NSF EAGER: Data-Driven Framework for Analyzing User Interactions in Social Media

  NSF · $200k · 2011–2015

• RR: Wireless Sensor Network Laboratory Infrastructure

  NSF · $110k · 2004–2008

• NSF EAGER: From a Virtualized Computing Nucleus to a Cloud Computing Universe

  NSF · $299k · 2010–2014

Frequent coauthors

• Amr El Abbadi

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  396 shared

• K. Selçuk Candan

  33 shared

• Sudipto Das

  32 shared

• Mohammad Javad Amiri

  Stony Brook University

  31 shared

• Ambuj K. Singh

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  28 shared

• Wen‐Syan Li

  Seoul National University

  25 shared

• Sujaya Maiyya

  20 shared

• Wang-Pin Hsiung

  19 shared

Education

• PhD, Computer Science

  Stony Brook University

  1987

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