Nima Shahbazi

Nima Shahbazi

Research Scientist at Megagon Labs

About me

I am a Research Scientist at Megagon Labs, working at the intersection of data management and AI. I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Chicago, where I was advised by Dr. Abol Asudeh. My doctoral research focused on algorithmic fairness and responsible AI, with a strong emphasis on data-centric approaches for which I received UIC College of Engineering Exceptional Research Promise Award.

Prior to my Ph.D., I completed my M.Sc. at the University of Texas at Dallas and earned my B.E. from the University of Isfahan. I was a Research Intern at Microsoft’s Gray Systems Lab in Summer 2025, and previously a Research Scientist Intern at Megagon Labs in Summer 2023.

I am always enthusiastic about the prospect of collaborating with fellow researchers, and I am more than willing to assist with any academic or research-related inquiries. Please don’t hesitate to reach out—I’m here to help!

Experiences

November 2025-Present

Summer 2025

Summer 2023

2020-2025

  • Research Assistant at InDex Lab at the University of Illinois Chicago

Publications

2026

  • Nima Shahbazi, Abolfazl Asudeh, Stavros Sintos “Fair Count-Min: Frequency Estimation under Equal Group-wise Approximation Factor”, in SIGMOD 2026.

  • Nima Shahbazi, Aryan Esmailpour, Stavros Sintos ”Weighted Set Multi-Cover on Bounded Universe and Applications in Package Recommendations”, in SIGMOD 2026.

2024

  • Nima Shahbazi, Mahdi Erfanian, Abolfazl Asudeh, Fatemeh Nargesian and Divesh Srivastava “FairEM360: A Suite for Responsible Entity Matching”, in VLDB 2024.

  • Sana Ebrahimi, Nima Shahbazi and Abolfazl Asudeh “REALM: Reliability and Equity through Aggregation in Large Language Models”, in NAACL Findings 2024.

  • Nima Shahbazi, Jin Wang, Zhengjie Miao and Nikita Bhutani. “Fairness-aware Data Preparation for Entity Matching”, in ICDE 2024.

  • Nima Shahbazi, Stavros Sintos and Abolfazl Asudeh. “FairHash: A Fair and Memory/Time-efficient Hash Map” in SIGMOD 2024.

  • Nima Shahbazi and Abolfazl Asudeh. “Reliability Evaluation of Individual Predictions: A Data-centric Approach”, in VLDB Journal.

  • Nima Shahbazi, Mahdi Erfanian and Abolfazl Asudeh “Coverage-based Data-centric Approaches for Responsible and Trustworthy AI”, in IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin March 2024 (Invited paper).

  • Melika Mousavi, Nima Shahbazi and Abolfazl Asudeh “Crowdsourcing Representation Bias Identification in form of Data Coverage in Image Data Sets”, in EDBT 2024.

2023

  • Nima Shahbazi, Nikola Danevski, Fatemeh Nargesian, Abolfazl Asudeh and Divesh Srivastava “Through the Fairness Lens: Experimental Analysis and Evaluation of Entity Matching”, in VLDB 2023

  • Nima Shahbazi, Yin Lin, Abolfazl Asudeh and H.V. Jagadish. 2023 “Representation Bias in Data: A Survey on Identification and Resolution Techniques”, in ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR).

  • Khanh Duy Nguyen, Nima Shahbazi and Abolfazl Asudeh “PopSim: Individual-level Population Simulation for Equitable Allocation of City Resources”. The International Workshop of Algorithmic Fairness in Artificial intelligence, Machine learning and Decision making (AFair-AMLD) 2023.

2021

  • Abolfazl Asudeh, Nima Shahbazi, Zhongjun Jin and H.V. Jagadish. 2021 “Identifying Insufficient Data Coverage for Ordinal Continuous-Valued Attributes”, in Proceedings of The 2021 International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD).

  • Hantian Zhang, Nima Shahbazi, Xu Chu and Abolfazl Asudeh. 2021 “FairRover: Explorative Model Building for Fair and Responsible Machine Learning”, in Proceedings of The Fifth International Workshop on Data Management for End-to-End Machine Learning (DEEM).

Professional Services

  • Reviewer for TKDE Journal
  • Reviewer for TKDD Journal
  • PC Member for CIKM’24, ‘25
  • Reviewer for Information Systems Journal
  • External Reviewer for ICDE’23, ‘25
  • Availability/Reproducibility Reviewer for SIGMOD’23, ‘24