Biography Contact Teaching Service Publications Awards Work Education

Biography

Wan Shen Lim is a PhD student in the Computer Science Department of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interest is in database management systems, specifically ML4DB (machine learning for databases). He is advised by Professor Andy Pavlo. Wan graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in May 2020 with a Bachelor of Science (University Honors) in Computer Science with an Algorithms and Complexity Concentration, a Computer Systems Concentration, and a Minor in Mathematical Sciences. He is a member of the Carnegie Mellon Database Group and Parallel Data Lab.

Contact

* I speak a mix of Hokkien and Teochew at home, but I never picked up a writing system.

Teaching

Teaching Assistant at Carnegie Mellon University. Guest Lectures.

Service

ACM SIGMOD (Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Management of Data).
  • Reviewer, Availability & Reproducibility Initiative (2024).
Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University.
  • Member, Doctoral Review Committee (Spring 2024, Fall 2024, Spring 2025).
  • Member, Curriculum Review Committee (Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Fall 2024, Spring 2025).
  • Member, Introductory Course Committee (Spring 2022).
  • Member, Open House Committee (Spring 2022).
  • Member, Dean's Undergraduate Student Advisory Council (Fall 2019, Spring 2020).
  • Co-Organizer, (Student-Run) PhD Mentorship Program (Spring 2024, Fall 2024, Spring 2025).
  • Member, (Student-Run) PhD Student Council (Spring 2024, Fall 2024, Spring 2025).
  • Mentor, (Student-Run) PhD Mentorship Program (Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023).
School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
  • Mentor, (Student-Run) Graduate Application Support Program (Fall 2020, Fall 2023).
  • Mentor, (Student-Run) TartanHacks (Spring 2017).

Publications

Profiles: Google Scholar, dblp
    1. The Holon Approach for Simultaneously Tuning Multiple Components in a Self-Driving Database Management System with Machine Learning via Synthesized Proto-Actions.
      William Zhang, Wan Shen Lim, Matthew Butrovich, Andrew Pavlo.
      VLDB 2024. PDF

    1. Hit the Gym: Accelerating Query Execution to Efficiently Bootstrap Behavior Models for Self-Driving Database Management Systems.
      Wan Shen Lim, Lin Ma, William Zhang, Matthew Butrovich, Samuel Arch, Andrew Pavlo.
      VLDB 2024. PDF

    1. Tigger: A Database Proxy That Bounces With User-Bypass.
      Matthew Butrovich, Karthik Ramanathan, John Rollinson, Wan Shen Lim, William Zhang, Justine Sherry, Andrew Pavlo.
      VLDB 2023. PDF

    1. Database Gyms.
      Wan Shen Lim, Matthew Butrovich, William Zhang, Andrew Crotty, Lin Ma, Peijing Xu, Johannes Gehrke, Andrew Pavlo.
      CIDR 2023. PDF

    1. Tastes Great! Less Filling! High Performance and Accurate Training Data Collection for Self-Driving Database Management Systems.
      Matthew Butrovich, Wan Shen Lim, Lin Ma, John Rollinson, William Zhang, Yu Xia, Andrew Pavlo. SIGMOD 2022. PDF

    1. Make Your Database System Dream of Electric Sheep: Towards Self-Driving Operation.
      Andrew Pavlo, Matthew Butrovich, Lin Ma, Wan Shen Lim, Prashanth Menon, Dana Van Aken, William Zhang.
      PVLDB 2021. PDF

    1. MB2: Decomposed Behavior Modeling for Self-Driving Database Management Systems.
      Lin Ma, William Zhang, Jie Jiao, Wuwen Wang, Matthew Butrovich, Wan Shen Lim, Prashanth Menon, Andrew Pavlo.
      SIGMOD 2021. PDF

    1. Filter Representation in Vectorized Query Execution.
      Amadou Ngom, Prashanth Menon, Matthew Butrovich, Lin Ma, Wan Shen Lim, Todd C. Mowry, Andrew Pavlo.
      DAMON 2021. PDF

    1. Everything is a Transaction: Unifying Logical Concurrency Control and Physical Data Structure Maintenance in Database Management Systems.
      Ling Zhang, Matthew Butrovich, Tianyu Li, Yash Nannapanei, Andrew Pavlo, John Rollinson, Huanchen Zhang, Ambarish Balakumar, Daniel Biales, Ziqi Dong, Emmanuel Eppinger, Jordi Gonzalez, Wan Shen Lim, Jianqiao Liu, Lin Ma, Prashanth Menon, Soumil Mukherjee, Tanuj Nayak, Amadou Ngom, Jeff Niu, Deepayan Patra, Poojita Raj, Stephanie Wang, Wuwen Wang, Yao Yu, William Zhang.
      CIDR 2021. PDF

    1. Mainlining Databases: Supporting Fast Transactional Workloads on Universal Columnar Data File Formats.
      Tianyu Li, Matthew Butrovich, Amadou Ngom, Wan Shen Lim, Wes McKinney, Andrew Pavlo.
      PVLDB 2020. PDF

    1. On Supporting Efficient Snapshot Isolation for Hybrid Workloads with Multi-Versioned Indexes.
      Yihan Sun, Guy Blelloch, Wan Shen Lim, Andrew Pavlo.
      PVLDB 2019. PDF

Honors and Awards

    1. Carnegie Mellon University. Senior Leadership Recognition.
    1. Carnegie Mellon University. Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship. Research with Carnegie Mellon Database Group / Professor Andy Pavlo.
    1. Ministry of Education, Brunei. Full ride scholarship to Carnegie Mellon University, USA.
    1. BruCERT ITPSS Cyber Battle (national cybersecurity CTF). First place.
    1. Shing-Tung Yau High School Mathematics Awards. Semi-Finalist.
    1. Singapore Science and Engineering Fair. Gold award.
    1. singpath (national high school coding competition). First place.
    1. Ministry of Education, Brunei. Full ride scholarship to NUS High School, Singapore. Three recipients nationwide.

Work History

Education History