I am currently a Moore-Sloan Data Science Fellow with the Center for Data Science at New York University. My research focuses on the intersection of data management and machine learning, with the interdisciplinary application to computational social science.

My work covers a wide spectrum. I enjoy tackling technical challenges in data management, such as automating data quality verification, optimizing programs that combine operations from linear and relational algebra or tracking the lineage of machine learning pipelines.

At the same time, I am convinced that modern data analysis can have a huge impact in answering pressing societal questions. In related research, I have analyzed the rise of the German far-right in social media, and cartographed the online tracking sphere from a webcrawl of several billion pages.

• Our paper on Learning to Validate the Predictions of Black Box Machine Learning Models on Unseen Data has been accepted for publication at the workshop on Human-in-the-Loop Data Analytics (HILDA) at ACM SIGMOD 2019.

• I am going to design and teach a novel course on Data Engineering for Machine Learning at NYU in fall.

• Our demo paper on Unit Testing Data with Deequ has been accepted to ACM SIGMOD 2019.

• My student Sergey’s paper on Automated Documentation of End-to-End Experiments in Data Science has been accepted at the PhD Symposium of ICDE 2019.

• I have been invited to join the program committee of ACM SIGMOD 2020.

Academia

• I am collaborating with the Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) Lab at NYU, conducting research on the polarization of online political debates on social media.

• I am co-supervising Sergey Redyuk who is a Ph.D. student at Technische Universität Berlin. We conduct research on novel systems for reproducibility of data science experiments and data quality validation for machine learning pipelines.

• I am conducting research on predicting political affiliation from text and on the social media usage of far-right actors with Prof. Felix Biessmann from Beuth University, Berlin.

Industry

• I am consulting Amazon Core AI as a part-time Senior Applied Scientist, and work on open source software for large-scale data quality verification with a team from Berlin.

• I regularly discuss my research on data quality and model validation with Immuta , a company building a data management platform for data science.

Before joining New York University, I have been a Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon Core AI in Berlin, where I worked on data management-related issues of machine learning applications, such as demand forecasting, metadata and provenance tracking of machine learning pipelines and automating data quality verification.

I received my Ph.D. from TU Berlin in 2015, where I have been advised by Volker Markl, head of the database systems and information management group. My co-supervisors were Klaus-Robert Müller from the machine learning group at TU Berlin and Reza Zadeh from Stanford.

During my studies, I have been interning with the SystemML group at IBM Research Almaden and the social recommendations team at Twitter in California.

I am engaged in open source as an elected member of the Apache Software Foundation, where I currently mentor the Apache TVM project on behalf of the Apache Incubator. In the past, I have been involved in the Apache Mahout, Apache Flink, Apache Giraph and Apache MXNet projects.

I am currently actively contributing to deequ, a library for ‘unit-testing’ large datasets with Apache Spark and recoreco, a fast item-to-item recommender written in Rust.

I am the originator and chair of the workshop series on Data Management for End-To-End Machine Learning (DEEM) at ACM SIGMOD, which started in 2017.

I regularly review submissions to top tier data management conferences. I have been on the program committee at SIGMOD 2019 & 2020, ICDE 2019 (demo track), ICDE 2018, SIGMOD 2017, EDBT 2017, the workshop on Exploiting Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Data Management at SIGMOD 2019 and the Large-Scale Recommender Systems workshop at the ACM RecSys 2013-2015. Additionally, I have reviewed submissions to journals for IEEE TKDE, ACM TIST, IEEE TPDS, the journal track of ECML/PKDD and the open source track of JMLR. I have also been a reviewer for the Amazon Research Awards.

I’m reachable via email at sebastian.schelter[at]nyu.edu. I’m also very actively using twitter as @sscdotopen. Most of the research code that I write is available under an open source license in my github account. Last but not least, I also have a profile in google scholar.