Erkang (Eric) Zhu
祝尔康

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I am a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, focusing on AI agents. I have also worked on database research in the past.

I am currently co-leading the development and community management of AutoGen , an open-source framework for building AI agents and multi-agent applications. AutoGen provides a simple, high-level API for creating and managing agents that work together to solve complex tasks automonously or under human supervision. It also provides an event-driven, low-level API for building workflows and gives developers full control of agent behavior. The framework is based on the Actor Model of distributed computing, with an agent runtime layer that can be deployed in a distributed environment, hosting agents created with different programming languages.

My previous projects at Microsoft Research focused on query processing. We developed a cost-based, platform-independent query plan rewrite rule for MATCH_RECOGNIZE queries in general-purpose SQL engines. The new rule boosts median query latency by 5.4X in Trino. In an even more ambitious undertaking, we developed a specialized execution engine for MATCH_RECOGNIZE, which includes an extended set of operators and a query optimizer based on a novel cost model. Our work resulted in a 6X median performance improvement over state-of-the-art specialized execution engines.

Before joining Microsoft Research, I completed my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Toronto, under the guidance of Prof. Renée J. Miller. My thesis is in dataset search over massive Open Data archives. Specifically, I contributed algorithms for large-scale set similarity search and data sketches . These algorithms can find joinable or unionable tables from over 100K tables in milliseconds. Based on my research work, I built an Open Data search engine stack to make it easy for people to use Open Data in their applications.

I am constantly exploring new ideas in computing through my open-source projects and writings. My goal is to work towards the democratization of computation, whereby advanced A.I. and algorithms are easily accessible to everyone.

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