I am Tarikul Islam Papon, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at UMass Boston. I am the Director and Founder of the Computing Hardware & Large Data Lab (CHiLL) @ UMass Boston. My research interests broadly include Data Systems, specifically focusing on hardware-aware data management challenges. I completed my PhD from the Computer Science Department of Boston University advised by Professor Manos Athanassoulis. During my PhD, I also worked as a Research Intern at Intel's Parallel Computing Lab (Summer '22) and at Microsoft Research's Data Systems Group (Summer '21).
Prior to joining Boston University, I was a lecturer at the Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CSE) in Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology (BUET) for 4 years. I completed my MSc and BSc degree from the same department. There I worked on medical informatics using various machine learning and embedded system techniques for health monitoring. Outside of the office I enjoy traveling and playing Pool (mostly 8 Ball and 9 Ball) and Table Tennis. I also love watching movie and tv series.
I am looking for motivated PhD students to contribute to developing cutting-edge data management solutions!
Professional Experience
Assistant Professor, UMass Boston (Sept 2025 - Present)
CS Preceptor, Harvard University (Jan 2025 - August 2025)
PhD Researcher, Boston University (Sept 2019 - May 2025)
Course Instructor, Boston University (Spring 2024)
Research Scientist Intern, Intel Corporation (May 2022 - Sept 2022)
Research Intern, Microsoft Research (May 2021 - Aug 2021)
Lecturer, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (Oct 2015 - August 2019)
Recent News
Publication
Highlight
Feb 2026 - I will serve as a Local Arrangements Chair in VLDB 2026.
Jan 2026 - I was the Organizer and General Chair of NEDB Day 2026 which held at UMass Boston. My lab presented 3 posters on our work on DB bufferpool, ZNS SSD and LSM compaction. [Poster 1][Poster 2][Poster 3]
Mar 2025 - Our demonstration paper on ACE got accepted in SIGMOD 2025! [Paper]
Dec 2024 - I will present a poster on our Reinforcement-learning based data migration policy for tiered storage in NEDB Day, 2025! [Abstract]
July 2024 - I will serve in the program committee of SIGMOD 2025 Demo.
May 2024 - I received the 2024 SIGMOD Student Scholarship to attend the conference and present our CAVE work in Chile!
Apr 2024 - I will give a talk on CAVE and present a poster on design principles of ZNS SSD in NEDB Day, 2024! [Talk Abstract]
Mar 2024 - Our invited article on "Effortless Locality on Data Systems using Relational Fabric" got accepted in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)! [Official Paper]
Feb 2024 - Our work "CAVE: Concurrency-Aware Graph Processing on SSDs" got accepted in SIGMOD 2024! [Local Paper][Official Paper]
Feb 2024 - My research work on SSD-aware data system design has been accepted in IEEE ICDE 2024 Ph.D. Symposium! [Local Paper]
Jan 2024 - I will serve as a course instructor for "CS 561: Data Systems Architectures" in Spring 24 at Boston University! [Class Website]
Nov 2023 - My internship work at Intel titled "Silhouette: Toward Performance-Conscious and Transferable CPU Embeddings" got accepted in the Workshop on ML for Systems at NeurIPS 2023! [Official Paper]
Sept 2023 - "On-the-fly Data Transformation in Action" wins the Best Demo Award at VLDB 2023!
June 2023 - Our demonstration "On-the-fly Data Transformation in Action" got accepted in VLDB 2023! [Official Paper]
Apr 2023 - Our journal work "Enabling Timely and Persistent Deletion in LSM-Engines" got accepted in ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS)! [Official Paper]
Mar 2023 - Our work "Software-Shaped Platforms" got accepted in CPS-IoT Week Workshops 2023! [Official Paper]
Feb 2023 - Our vision paper "Relational Fabric: Transparent Data Transformation" got accepted in IEEE ICDE 2023! [Official Paper]
Nov 2022 - Our work "ACEing the Bufferpool Management Paradigm for Modern Storage Devices" got accepted in IEEE ICDE 2023! [Paper]
June 2022 - Our work "Relational Memory: Native In-Memory Accesses on Rows and Columns" got accepted in EDBT 2023! [Official Paper]
May 2022 - Really excited to share that I have joined Intel as a Research Scientist Intern for this Summer!
Mar 2022 - Our invited article on "Building Deletion-Compliant Data Systems" has been accepted in IEEE DEBull. [Official Paper]
Jan 2022 - One of my MSc works "UACD: A Local Approach for Identifying the Most Influential Spreaders in Twitter in a Distributed Environment" got accepted in Social Network Analysis and Mining (SNAM)! [Official Paper]
June 2021 - Our work "A Parametric I/O Model for Modern Storage Devices" got accepted in DaMoN 2021! [Official Paper][Video][Slides]
Mar 2021 - Really excited to share that I will be joining Microsoft Research as a Research Intern in Summer 2021!
Jan 2021 - Our work "The Need for a New I/O Model" wins honorable mention for Best Gong Show talk at CIDR 2021! [Paper] [Video][Slides]