About Me
I am the Computer Science Program Head and an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at NYU Abu Dhabi, and a Global Network Assistant Professor of Computer Science at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
My research combines data and knowledge engineering with machine learning to address challenges arising from incomplete and heterogeneous data. My work spans knowledge representation and completion, question answering and graph reasoning, multimodal learning, and explanation of model predictions. I place particular emphasis on developing interpretable reasoning systems that can support human-machine collaboration for knowledge completion and curation.
I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and my M.S. from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette as a Fulbright Scholar. Previously, I was a Research Scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation and a Data Science Fellow at NYU’s Center for Data Science. I also held internships at Microsoft Research and through Google Summer of Code.
News
- 2026: DBRAG accepted to the AACL-IJCNLP main conference; Explore-over-Graph accepted to Findings of AACL-IJCNLP.
- 2026: RAW-Explainer accepted to Learning on Graphs.
- 2026: Awarded an LSE–NYU Research Seed Fund grant with Sichen Li and Hao Zhang for “Soft Power vs. Material Power: Comparing the Effects of Chinese Media Campaigns and Overseas Investment on Local Perceptions.”
- 2025: Became Computer Science Program Head at NYU Abu Dhabi in September.
- 2025: Received the ISWC Best In-Use Paper Award for cube.link with my coauthors.
- 2025: Received the NYU Abu Dhabi Palm Teaching Award.
Research Systems
- WikiRAG: Retrieval-augmented generation for evidence-based knowledge graph completion on Wikidata.
- SEER: A toolkit for benchmarking time series database systems in monitoring applications.
- OLTP-Bench: A database benchmarking framework with configurable workloads and performance measurements.
Recent Publications
The full publication list is available in my CV and on Google Scholar.
2026
- DBRAG: Multi-Table Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Complex Database Queries
Prince Larbi Ampofo, Ryoji Kubo, Djellel Difallah
AACL-IJCNLP 2026 (Accepted, main conference) [Preprint] - Explore-over-Graph: Hybrid Embedding–LLM Reasoning for Knowledge Graph Question Answering under Incompleteness
Ola El Khatib, Djellel Difallah
Findings of AACL-IJCNLP 2026 (Accepted, Findings) [Preprint] - RAW-Explainer: Post-hoc Explanations of Path Reasoning Graph Neural Networks for Knowledge Graph Completion
Ryoji Kubo, Samyam Lamichhane, Djellel Difallah
Learning on Graphs 2026 (Accepted) [Preprint] - UniST-Pred: A Robust Unified Framework for Spatio-Temporal Traffic Forecasting in Transportation Networks Under Disruptions
Yue Wang, Djellel Difallah, Areg Karapetyan, Samer Madanat
IJCAI 2026, pp. 7501–7511 [Paper] - MLaGA: Multimodal Large Language and Graph Assistant
Dongzhe Fan, Jiajin Liu, Yi Fang, Djellel Difallah, Qiaoyu Tan
KDD 2026, pp. 1027–1038 - A Demonstration of WikiRAG: An Evidence-Based Link Prediction for Wikidata with Retrieval Augmented Generation
Rohan Sabu, Ola El Khatib, Djellel Difallah
SIGIR 2026 — Demo, pp. 5204–5208 [Live demo]
2025
- WikiRAG: Revisiting Wikidata KGC Datasets with Community Updates and Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Djellel Difallah
KDD 2025 — Datasets and Benchmarks, pp. 5391–5401 [Live demo] - Open Government Data as Multi-dimensional 5 Star Data: cube.link
Michael Luggen, Benedikt Hitz, Julien Audiffren, Djellel Difallah, Jean-Luc Cochard, Philippe Cudré-Mauroux
ISWC 2025 — Best In-Use Paper Award
2024
- XGExplainer: Robust Evaluation-based Explanation for Graph Neural Networks
Ryoji Kubo, Djellel Difallah
SDM 2024, pp. 64–72 - SEER: An End-to-End Toolkit for Benchmarking Time Series Database Systems in Monitoring Applications
Luca Althaus, Mourad Khayati, Abdelouahab Khelifati, Anton Dignös, Djellel Difallah, Philippe Cudré-Mauroux
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment 17(12), 2024 — Demo, pp. 4361–4364 [Live demo]
Awards and Honors
- Best In-Use Paper Award, ISWC, 2025 — cube.link.
- NYU Abu Dhabi Palm Teaching Award, AY 2024–2025.
- Distinguished Reviewers Board, ACM Transactions on the Web, 2022.
- Outstanding Reviewer, The Web Conference, 2018.
- Best Computer Science Ph.D. Thesis Award, University of Fribourg, February 2016.
- Fulbright Scholarship, 2009–2011.
Presentations and Tutorials
- WikiRAG, KDD 2025 — Datasets and Benchmarks presentation.
- RAW-Explainer, MLoG-GenAI workshop at KDD 2025 — non-proceedings poster presentation.
- Knowledge Discovery and Exploration with LLMs and Graph ML, AIE 2025, NYU Abu Dhabi — invited talk.
- Machine-in-the-loop: A New Paradigm of Crowdsourcing for Wikipedia Editing, WSDM 2023 Crowd Science Workshop, Singapore — invited talk.
- Aggregation Techniques in Crowdsourcing: Multiple Choice Questions and Beyond, CIKM 2021 — tutorial with Alessandro Checco.
- Using Crowdsourcing Effectively for Social Media Research, ICWSM 2016 — tutorial with Ujwal Gadiraju, Gianluca Demartini, and Michele Catasta.
- It’s Getting Crowded! How to Use Crowdsourcing Effectively for Web Science Research, Web Science 2016 — tutorial with Ujwal Gadiraju, Gianluca Demartini, and Michele Catasta.
Teaching
NYU Abu Dhabi — Graduate
- Introduction to Data Science (IDSC-GH 5010) — Fall 2026. Master of Science in Interdisciplinary Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.
NYU Abu Dhabi — Undergraduate
- Research Seminar (CS-UH 3090) — Spring 2026.
- Data Structures (CS-UH 1050) — Fall 2025, Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Spring 2021.
- Directed Study: Graph Machine Learning (CS-UH 3250) — Spring 2025.
- Big Data Systems, Special Topics in Computer Science (CS-UH 3260) — Fall 2024, Spring 2023.
- Discrete Mathematics (CS-UH 1002) — Fall 2022, Fall 2021 (two sections).
- Directed Study: Probabilistic Machine Learning (CS-UH 3250) — Spring 2022.
Previous Teaching
- Data Mining for Business Analytics (MBA), Stern School of Business, NYU — Spring 2019, instructor.
- Big Data Infrastructures, University of Fribourg — Fall 2016, co-instructor.
- Data Science Seminar, University of Fribourg — Fall 2015, co-instructor.
- Social Computing, University of Fribourg — 2011–2014, teaching assistant.
Professional Activities
University Service — NYU Abu Dhabi
- Computer Science Program Head (Sep 2025 – Present)
- Minor in AI and Machine Learning – Proposal development (2026)
- Science and Engineering Curriculum Committee (CS representative) (Sep 2022 – 2025)
- Undergraduate Curriculum Committee (At-large member) (Sep 2021 – Dec 2023)
- Master of Science in Interdisciplinary Data Science and Artificial Intelligence – Proposal working group member (2021 – 2022)
- Search Committee Member (CS Professor, Open Rank) (AY 2021 – 2022)
- Search Committee Member (CS Instructor) (AY 2021 – 2022)
- Contract Faculty Review Committees (Chair of one committee)
- Undergraduate Research Grants Reviewer (CS proposals) (2021 – Present)
- Piano Prize Committee Member (2022 – 2023)
Senior Program Committee
- ECIR (SPC): 2027
- ICDM (Area Chair): 2026, 2024, 2023
- CIKM (Research Track SPC): 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023
- CIKM (Applied Research Track SPC): 2022, 2021, 2020
- HCOMP (SPC): 2024
- AAAI: 2024, 2023
Program Committee
- IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM): 2025, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018
- ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD): 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017
- ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM): 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2018, 2017
- International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR): 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020
- ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM): 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021
- ACM Web Conference (WWW): 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017
- AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI): 2022, 2021, 2020
- IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE): 2026, 2025
- AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP): 2024, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019
- International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC): 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019
- SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM): 2022
- Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD): 2025
- ACM International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD): 2025
- International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM): 2018
- International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE): 2016
- International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo): 2022, 2020, 2019
- Wiki Workshop: 2023, 2022, 2021
- Wiki NLP Workshop: 2025
Conference Session Chair
- Session Chair: ICDM 2024, ISWC 2022, SIGIR 2021, KDD 2021