Pınar Tözün
pinartozun.bsky.social
Pınar Tözün
@pinartozun.bsky.social
Head of Data, Systems, and Robotics Section & Associate Professor at IT University of Copenhagen
https://www.pinartozun.com/
https://itu-dasyalab.github.io/RAD/
http://distortedpollyanna.blogspot.com/
[not work] Continuing with the themes of last month's post, this time with a focus on the choice of having children.
distortedpollyanna.blogspot.com/2025/11/chil...
Childless Petless Plantless Lady: Part 2
When I was in elementary school, my aunt periodically suffered from benign cysts and the associated pain in her breasts. She was unmarried...
distortedpollyanna.blogspot.com
November 23, 2025 at 1:46 PM
Reposted by Pınar Tözün
2 #Postdoc positions at TU Wien (Vienna, Austria)

1️⃣ Data Warehousing & System Performance
jobs.tuwien.ac.at/Job/259680

2️⃣ Natural Language Interfaces, LLMs, Exploratory Data Access
jobs.tuwien.ac.at/Job/259683

Appl. deadline: Nov 13, 2025
Details: dmki-tuwien.github.io/jobs.html

@dmki.bsky.social
University Assistant Prae-Doc (all genders)
jobs.tuwien.ac.at
October 29, 2025 at 4:55 PM
[not work] Earlier this month, I was at an old friend’s wedding, which was a very happy occasion. Such occasions are also where I hear too many people wishing the same happy ending for me. However, I also wish to root for alternative happy endings.
distortedpollyanna.blogspot.com/2025/10/chil...
Childless Petless Plantless Lady: Part 1
Warning: This post contains spoilers for Little Women , C'è ancora domani , Sirens , Barbie , Russian Doll ,  Fleabag , and And Just L...
distortedpollyanna.blogspot.com
October 27, 2025 at 9:20 PM
Reposted by Pınar Tözün
The accepted papers for CIDR 2026 are up!

I'm looking forward to "I Can't Believe It's Not Yannakakis: Pragmatic Bitmap Filters in Microsoft SQL Server" and "Please Don't Kill My Vibe: Empowering Agents with Data Flow Control"

cidrdb.org/cidr2026/pap...
CIDR 2026 - Accepted Papers
The 16th Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR 2026), Accepted Papers
cidrdb.org
October 24, 2025 at 11:53 PM
Reposted by Pınar Tözün
There was collaboration attempt between CMU, Tsinghua, Meta, CWI, Nvidia, Voltron, & SpiralDB. But then lawyers got involved and it fell apart. Everyone released their own format:
→ Meta Nimble: github.com/facebookincu...
→ CWI FastLanes: github.com/cwida/FastLa...
→ SpiralDB Vortex: vortex.dev
GitHub - facebookincubator/nimble: New file format for storage of large columnar datasets.
New file format for storage of large columnar datasets. - facebookincubator/nimble
github.com
October 1, 2025 at 1:49 PM
Reposted by Pınar Tözün
I'm hiring PhDs through the ELLIS PhD program for research on table representation learning to democratize insights from tabular data!

Info: trl-lab.github.io/open-positio...
Apply: apply.ellis.eu (31 Oct)

Join us in beautiful Amsterdam at @cwi-amsterdam.bsky.social & @ellisamsterdam.bsky.social
October 1, 2025 at 6:48 PM
Reposted by Pınar Tözün
October 2, 2025 at 9:46 AM
📢📢 The September 2025 issue of SIGMOD Record is out, so is the Reminiscences column. Thank you, Viktor Leis, Anja Gruenheid, @senorcarbone.bsky.social, and @elenitz.bsky.social for the great contributions!
pdf --> sigmodrecord.org/publications...
September 30, 2025 at 12:53 PM
[not work] The last post already had some recollections of VLDB 2021, so I decided to continue those recollections.
distortedpollyanna.blogspot.com/2025/09/the-...
The Summer of VLDB 2021
Note: An account of the lessons learned while organizing and running a hybrid conference like VLDB 2021  can be found here . This post is ...
distortedpollyanna.blogspot.com
September 28, 2025 at 3:05 PM
Reposted by Pınar Tözün
This Wednesday, 24 September 2025 at 14:30, our Professor Luca Aiello @lajello.bsky.social will give his inaugural lecture in Auditorium 0 at the IT University in Copenhagen!

en.itu.dk/About-ITU/Pr...
Professor portrait: Luca Aiello wants to make the internet a better place
On 24 September 2025 at 14:30, Professor Luca Aiello will give his inaugural lecture in Auditorium 0 at the IT University in Copenhagen.
en.itu.dk
September 22, 2025 at 6:29 AM
Reposted by Pınar Tözün
Next week is the start of @db.cs.cmu.edu's latest seminar series: Future Data Systems
@samarchdb.bsky.social and I are hosting speakers from leading systems in the datalake / lakehouse space.
Mondays @ 4:30pm ET via Zoom. Open to the public. Videos posted to YouTube: db.cs.cmu.edu/seminars/fal...
September 17, 2025 at 11:15 PM
Reposted by Pınar Tözün
I'm hiring a postdoc at ITU Copenhagen with experience in NLP, who is keen on improving citizens' experience of health emergency triage in an exciting project with the Danish emergency helpline and the University of Copenhagen. Knowledge of Danish is helpful. candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...
Citizen-Facing Bidirectional AI for Emergency Triage
The IT University of Copenhagen invites highly motivated individuals to apply for a two year Postdoc position starting in November 2025 or soon thereafter. We i
candidate.hr-manager.net
September 11, 2025 at 11:36 AM
[not work] A post for all the times that we feel like we need a break. distortedpollyanna.blogspot.com/2025/09/when...
When You Need a Break
August 26, 2021, the week after VLDB 2021 and two days after I got my second COVID shot, was the date for our annual department BBQ in 20...
distortedpollyanna.blogspot.com
September 9, 2025 at 9:50 AM
Congrats to Marcel Weisgut for his first VLDB paper!! 🎉🎉
Vol:18 No:9 → CXL Memory Performance for In-Memory Data Processing
👥 Authors: Marcel Weisgut, Daniel Ritter, Pinar Tözün, Lawrence Benson, Tilmann Rabl
📄 PDF: https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol18/p3119-weisgut.pdf
August 21, 2025 at 8:11 AM
Reposted by Pınar Tözün
Congratulations to Sebastian Baunsgaard successfully defending his PhD thesis, "Workload-aware Compressed Linear Algebra for Data-centric Machine Learning Pipelines"

Sebastian is part of the DAMS group (lead: @matthiasboehm7.bsky.social) BIFOLD / @tuberlin.bsky.social

#phd #defended
August 14, 2025 at 8:03 AM
Reposted by Pınar Tözün
Big congrats to our postdoc @elisabassignana.bsky.social for the well deserved Social Impact award at #ACL2025NLP!!
Super proud to receive the Social Impact award at #ACL2025NLP for our paper together with @amandacurry.bsky.social (eq contribution) and @dirkhovy.bsky.social 🎉

#NLProc
July 30, 2025 at 4:55 PM
[not work] Another visit to Turkey is over. As usual, I was asked several times when I would be back for good. Hence, the trigger for this month’s post.
distortedpollyanna.blogspot.com/2025/07/bad-...
Bad Daughter / Citizen / Friend / …
After 7 years in Denmark, I still go to Danish classes, not for an exam anymore, mainly to practice speaking Danish. The others in the c...
distortedpollyanna.blogspot.com
July 28, 2025 at 11:46 AM
Reposted by Pınar Tözün
As more engineers use coding agents professionally, the traditional junior engineering mentorship model delays two skills they need to be successful with agents. Junior engineers need earlier introductions to task definition and code review. I wrote about that here: blog.marcua.net/2025/07/21/m...
Mentoring junior engineers in the age of coding agents
A decent amount of digital ink has been spilled about the future of software engineering in light of increasingly powerful coding agents. Will software engineers, especially junior ones, be able to fi...
blog.marcua.net
July 21, 2025 at 3:40 PM
Reposted by Pınar Tözün
On Thursday, @oovcharenko.bsky.social will present her research on "scSSL-Bench: Benchmarking Self-Supervised Learning for Single-Cell Data". This paper is joint work with ETH Zuerich and was selected as a spotlight poster:

icml.cc/virtual/2025...

(2/3)
July 14, 2025 at 6:11 AM
Reposted by Pınar Tözün
The Data Systems Lab is seeking a motivated PhD candidate to join our team and work on foundation models for data compression.
July 5, 2025 at 2:47 PM
The June 2025 issue of SIGMOD Record is out, so is the Reminiscences column. Thank you, Zoi Kaoudi, Fatemeh Nargesian, and Niv Dayan for the contributions!
sigmodrecord.org/publications...
June 27, 2025 at 9:03 PM
On the train to Berlin, looking forward to @sigmod2025.bsky.social !
Following the schedule, ...
(0) I have a panel participation at the MIDAS workshop on Sunday at 15:30 on Data & GenAI. Thanks, Tilmann Rabl, for the invitation.
👇
June 21, 2025 at 9:23 AM
As I was preparing the June 2025 issue of SIGMOD Record's Reminiscences column, I realized that I haven't advertised the previous issue. So, belated thanks to Vanessa Braganholo and Martin Hentschel for their contributions to the December 2024 issue.
sigmodrecord.org/publications...
June 21, 2025 at 8:27 AM
Reposted by Pınar Tözün
Join us for discussions and talks on data management aspects for end-to-end ML on 27 June at @deem-workshop.bsky.social in Berlin. Keynotes by @pinartozun.bsky.social and @gaelvaroquaux.bsky.social 🤩

Check the full schedule deem-workshop.github.io#schedule & proceedings dl.acm.org/doi/proceedi...
Proceedings of the Workshop on Data Management for End-to-End Machine Learning | ACM Conferences
dl.acm.org
June 16, 2025 at 7:49 AM