Ihab Ilyas

Ihab Ilyas was born in Egypt on May 13, 1973. He moved internationally, to the United States, after graduating from Alexandria University in 1999. While in the United States, he attended Purdue University from 1999-2004. Ilyas is a computer scientist specializing in data science and is an acting professor at the University of Waterloo’s David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Ilyas is best known for his role as co-founder of Inductive Inc., where he also served as CEO from inception to its Apple Inc. acquisition in May 2020.

Additionally, he co-founded Tamr Inc., alongside Andy Palmer and Michael Stonebraker.

Inductiv Inc., was a Canadian start-up that used machine learning to automate the identification and correction of data errors, also known as data cleaning. It was founded by Ihab Ilyas, Theodoros Rekatsinas, and Christopher Ré in 2019. On May 27, 2020, Apple Inc. announced that it had acquired Inductiv for an undisclosed amount to improve Siri, a product integration for Apple devices.

Primal.ai is an artificial intelligence (AI) company that uses machine learning in enterprise applications designed to mimic human intelligence. Ilyas began his career with Primal in 2014 as a Scientific Advisor and maintained this position until 2019. A Scientific Advisor is responsible for providing management and leadership of an organization with technical and scientific information.

Forge.AI is an AI cloud-based, activity-based intelligence platform that converts unstructured data to structure analytics and readable knowledge in real-time. This software is used by science teams, analysts, algorithms, and applications. Ilyas serves as an advisory board member on a volunteer basis, offering knowledge, experience, and guidance in clean data development.

Tamr Inc., is an enterprise data unification company founded by Ihab Ilya, Andy Palmer (CEO), and Mike Stonebraker. The company developed a patented software platform that uses machine learning and human expertise to unite and prepare siloed data for business analytics.

At the University of Waterloo, Ihab Illyas is a professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science and the NSERC-Thomson Reuters Research Chair on data quality. He primarily researches big data and database systems and expresses particular interest in data quality, data integration, managing uncertain data, machine learning for data curation, and information extraction. Ilyas began his career at Waterloo in 2004.

Ilyas attended Alexandria University in Alexandria, Egypt, from 1990-1995 to achieve a B.Sc, Computer Science degree. He then returned to Alexandria University in 1996 to obtain his M.S., Computer Science degree and graduated in 1999.

Ilyas was accepted into Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and began attending a Ph.D., Computer Science program in 1999. He completed his Ph.D. degree in 2004 and started his career as a professor at the University of Waterloo.

• Google Faculty Award, 2014
• ACM Distinguished Scientist Award, 2014
• NSERC Discovery Accelerator Award, 2014-2018, NSERC
• Cheriton Faculty Fellowship, 2013-2016, University of Waterloo
• ACM SIGMOD 2015 Best Demo Award
• Ontario Early Researcher Award, 2008, Government of Ontario
• Taha Hussein Medal for top 10 high school students in the nation, 1990, Ministry of Education, Egypt