
ACM PODS Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award
Alberto O. Mendelzon
was an international leader in the principles of database systems. His
pioneering work on database dependencies has been influential in both
the theory and practice of data management. His work has inspired
research and practice in database design, query processing, and data
integration. He made fundamental contributions in the areas of
graphical and visual query languages, knowledge-base systems, and
online-analytic processing. His work has provided the foundation for
languages used to search web data. The volume of these applications
is a testament to the truly foundational nature of his results.
Mendelzon was a Professor of Computer Science at the University of
Toronto and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He was selected
by the top organizations in database research to chair or co-chair ten
program committees of major conferences that span the entire spectrum
of database research, from theory (including PODS), to systems (for
example, VLDB), to emerging areas (for example, the WWW
conference). Mendelzon served as General Chair of the PODS conference
from 1997 to 1999. In addition to being a leader of the database
community, Mendelzon was an outstanding educator, who guided the
research of 19 doctoral students and of numerous postdoctoral fellows
until he passed away in June 2005.
The ACM PODS Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award was established
in 2007 and was awarded for the first time in 2008. It is awarded
every year to a paper or a small number of papers published in the
PODS proceedings ten years prior that had the most impact in terms of
research, methodology, or transfer to practice over the intervening
decade. Each year, the winner(s) of the ACM PODS Alberto
O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award receive plaques and the sum of $1,000
(divided equally among the winners, if more than one). The award is
funded by a generous gift from IBM.
Recipients ACM PODS Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award:
| 2008 |
The 2008 Award Committee consisted of Catriel Beeri (Chair), Georg
Gottlob, and Jan Paredaens. The Award Committee selected the following
two papers from the 1998 PODS proceedings as the award winners for
2008:
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Serge Abiteboul and Oliver M. Duschka. Complexity of Answering Queries
Using Materialized Views.
This paper dealt with a central problem in database research,
with numerous applications in data management. It provided a
conceptual framework and a terminology for the problem, and presented
a comprehensive analysis of its complexity.
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Phokion G. Kolaitis and Moshe Y. Vardi. Conjunctive-Query Containment
and Constraint Satisfaction.
This paper investigated the relationship between two fundamental and
extensively studied problems from the database and artificial
intelligence areas, respectively. It showed that the two problems are
equivalent, and investigated conditions that guarantee polynomial-time
solutions, explaining in particular, many previously known polynomial
time solutions.
Both papers are extensively cited in the literature, and both had a
major influence on the methodology and direction of subsequent
research. Hence, the committee has found both to be worthy of the
Award. The committee notes that the nomination of these two papers as
first winners of the Alberto O. Mendelzon Award is particularly
appropriate, since both deal with problems very closely related to his
research interests.
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