Biographical Sketch: Hamid Pirahesh, Ph.D., is an IBM fellow, ACM Fellow, and a senior manager, responsible for the exploratory database department at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. He also has direct responsibilities in various aspects of IBM information management products. He has served as an associate editor of ACM Computing Surveys and has served on program committee of major computer conferences. Hamid is a member of IBM Academy. Hamid's current focus is big data analytics on highly scalable servers. Hamid was a principle member of the original team that designed the query processing architecture of the IBM DB2 LUW relational DBMS and delivered the product to the marketplace. He has made major contributions to query language industry standards. His research areas include cloud computing, OLAP and aggregate data management, query optimization, data warehousing, big data systems, management of semi-structured and unstructured data, including nosql DBs. He also serves as a consultant to various IBM divisions, including the software division and IBM Global Services.