Biography
Shahram Ghandeharizadeh received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1990. Since then, he has been on the faculty at the University of Southern California. In 1992, Dr. Ghandeharizadeh received the National Science Foundation Young Investigator's Award for his research on the physical design of parallel database systems. In 1995, he received an award from the School of Engineering at USC in recognition of his research activities. He was a recipient of the ACM Software System Award 2008 for his contributions to Gamma, a scalable database management system. His research interests include design, implementation and evaluation of novel architectures for high performance data intensive applications, intelligent 3D multimedia displays, multimedia based social networking systems, transaction processing systems, and benchmarking. He has served on the organizing committees of numerous conferences; most recently as the general chair of
Holodecks 2026 and VLDB 2019, and program co-chair of the Brave New Ideas track of
ACM Multimedia 2026. His activities are supported by several grants from the National Science Foundation, Oracle, Microsoft, BMC Software, and Hewlett-Packard. He is a distinguished member of the ACM and the director of the database laboratory at USC. He was a member of ACM SIGMOD executive committee and the Editor-in-Chief of ACM SIGMOD DiSC from 2003 to 2006. He served as a member of the Council of Directors of Kodaikanal International School from 2005 to 2008.
He is organizing a two day residency on immersive technologies in July 2026:
Day 1:
ACM SIGGRAPH Frontiers Workshop, July 23, Los Angeles Convention Center. This visionary prelude focuses on Flying Light Specks (FLSs) as an enabling technology for Dronevision, Holodecks, and Spatial Computing. FLSs are a class of robots. The workshop discusses complementary technologies such as HoloTiles and robots of varying forms and functions.
Day 2:
The 3rd International Conference on Holodecks, July 24, USC. This one-day summit focuses on the realization of 3D immersive environments in support of future human-data and human-human interactions.
Three Recent Publications:
1. Techniques to Conceal Dark Standby Flying Light Specks. To appear in the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing. With H. Alimohammadzadeh and S. Zhu.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3724399.
2. Illuminating English Letters using a Flying Light Speck. In the Third ACM Workshop on UAVs in Multimedia. Dublin, Ireland, October 27, 2025. With H. Alimohammadzadeh.
3. DiStash: A Disaggregated Multi-Stash Transactional Key-Value Store. In the Seventeenth TPCTC Workshop co-located with VLDB, London, UK, September 2025. With Y. Gao, H. Nguyen, and J. Li.
