Keynote: The Road to 23ai: A Perspective on Achieving Impact as an Industrial Lab

Dr. Hassan Chafi

Vice President, Research and Advanced Development, Oracle

In this keynote, Dr. Hassan Chafi will share his personal perspective on his team’s journey from its beginnings as a couple of interns in 2011 to becoming responsible for key components in Oracle’s flagship product, Oracle Database 23c, now known as 23ai. He will explore the development of significant features such as operational graphs, an in-database JavaScript engine, and vector index support. Beyond the technical achievements, Dr. Chafi will discuss the lessons learned on the softer side of innovation, including building trust, resilience, and strategic thinking.

Dr. Hassan Chafi is the Vice President of Research and Advanced Development at Oracle. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Stanford University. In his current role, Dr. Chafi leads various projects, from investigating research ideas at their early stages of inception to identifying promising opportunities to turn these ideas into advanced software services ready to be consumed by other Oracle products and customers.

Dr. Chafi’s team has contributed major features to Oracle’s flagship product, the Oracle Database. His team recently introduced the new ISO SQL graph query standards, which have been implemented natively in the Oracle Database, and was responsible for some of the key components of Oracle 23ai’s Vector DB support.

Dr. Chafi has more than 60 technical patents.