Tuesday, August 24, 2021
University Professor M. Tamer Özsu has received the 2022 IEEE Innovation in Societal Infrastructure Award, an honour conferred for significant technological achievements and contributions that establish, develop and proliferate innovative societal infrastructure systems through the application of information technology with an emphasis on distributed computing systems.
He was selected for this award for his many contributions to data science infrastructure and distributed data management.
M. Tamer Özsu, a University Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, is no stranger to prestigious awards and international academic acclaim.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is also an elected member of Science Academy, Turkey and a member of Sigma Xi.
He received the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from CS Can | Info Can, and in 2020 was named a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, a title awarded to scholars of the highest international reputation. In 2021, he was named for the third time a Cheriton Faculty Fellow, a prestigious recognition that supports the research of leading faculty members at the Cheriton School of Computer Science.
“Congratulations to Tamer on receiving this prestigious recognition from IEEE,” said Raouf Boutaba, Professor and Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science. “As a major contributor to distributed data management, his innovations, sustained research and leadership have undoubtedly shaped the field.”
The IEEE Innovation in Societal Infrastructure Award, sponsored by Hitachi, Ltd. and the IEEE Computer Society, consists of a bronze medal, a certificate, and a $10,000 USD cash prize. The award will be presented at the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, tentatively scheduled to take place in May 2022 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The IEEE Innovation in Societal Infrastructure Award was established in 2011.
About University Professor M. Tamer Özsu
University Professor Özsu’s research is on data engineering aspects of the broad field of data science. His research follows two threads — large-scale data distribution, and management of non-relational data. His current research focuses on graph-structured data and RDF; he has previously studied distributed transaction processing, object systems, image, video, XML data, and their management in a distributed environment.
His research contributions have been recognized with a number of awards. In 2015, he received the ACM SIGMOD Test-of-Time Award that recognizes “the best paper from the SIGMOD proceedings 10 years prior, based on the criterion of identifying the paper that has had the most impact (research, products, methodology) over the intervening decade.” This was for Robust and Fast Similarity Search for Moving Object Trajectories, a paper published in 2005, co-authored with his former PhD student Lei Chen, now a Professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and former postdoctoral fellow Vincent Oria, now a Professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology. In 2018, The Ubiquity of Large Graphs and Surprising Challenges of Graph Processing, a paper he co-authored with his colleagues Semih Salihoglu and Jimmy Lin and graduate students Siddhartha Sahu and Amine Mhedhbi, won the Best Paper Award at the 44th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases. In 2018, Optimizing Multi-Query Evaluation in Federated RDF Systems, a paper he co-authored with his colleagues Peng Peng, Lei Zou and Dongyan Zhao from Peking University received the best paper award at the 23rd International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications.
With his colleague Patrick Valduriez, University Professor Özsu coauthored Principles of Distributed Database Systems, a classic text now in its fourth edition. He also co-edited, with Ling Liu, the Encyclopedia of Database Systems, the second edition of an influential reference. He has also served as founding editor-in-chief of two book series — the Synthesis Lectures on Data Management and the ACM Books series.
University Professor Özsu chairs the Steering/Advisory Committee of Polytechnic University of Hong Kong Research Centre on Data Science and AI. He serves on the Advisory Committee of Istanbul Technical University (Turkey) Artificial Intelligence and Data Science Application and Research Centre, Technical Advisory Committee of Tsinghua University (China) National Engineering Laboratory for Big Data Software, and Advisory Boards of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology School of Engineering and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Big Data Institute.
He has served as general chair or program chair of 12 international conferences. He is among a select few who have served as program chair of all three top database conferences — the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, the International Conference on Management of Data, and the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering. He also led ACM SIGMOD for two terms. During his stewardship as editor-in-chief, VLDB Journal became a premier publication on scholarly contributions that examine information system architectures, the impact of technological advancements on information systems, and the development of novel database applications.
University Professor Özsu has served on a number of scientific boards. He was a trustee of the VLDB Endowment (1996–2002), a member of the CRA Board of Directors (2010–13), International Advisory Board of National Institute of Informatics, Japan (2011–18); CS-Can | Info-Can Board (2017–19); ACM Publications Board (2003–17), and served as the Advisory Board Chair, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Department of Computer Science and Engineering (2014–17). He currently serves as a Technical Advisory Board Member of Tsinghua University National Engineering Laboratory for Big Data Software and an Advisory Board Member of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Big Data Institute.
