Previously, he was a postdoctoral associate working in the Database Systems group at MIT. He received his Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology EPFL, where he won both the Doctorate Award and the EPFL Press Mention in 2007. Before joining the University of Fribourg, he worked on distributed information management systems for HP, IBM T.J. Watson Research, and Microsoft Research Asia. His research interests are in exascale data management infrastructures for non-relational data. Webpage: http://diuf.unifr.ch/xi