Rakesh Agrawal
IBM Almaden Research Center
San Jose, CA 95120, U.S.A.
ragrawal@almaden.ibm.com

Short biography

Rakesh Agrawal is the Project Leader for Data Mining at the IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1983. He also has a B.E. degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the University of Roorkee, Roorkee (India) and a two-year Post Graduate Diploma in Industrial Engineering from NITIE, Bombay (India). From 1983 to 1989, he was with the AT\&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, where he was a member of the technical staff in the Computing Systems Research Laboratory. Since January 1990, He has been with the IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California.

Rakesh Agrawal is currently the Chairman of the IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering. He is also an Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Database Systems, and an Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. He has been a Program Chair for the 19th International Conference on Very Large Databases, 1993, a Program Chair for the 2nd International Symposium on Databases in Parallel and Distributed Systems, 1990, and an Associate Editor of IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin. He has published extensively in technical journals and conferences. He has also authored a book on "Programming in ANSI C". His current research interests include data mining, object-oriented database systems, and parallel and distributed computing.

Rakesh Agrawal is a Senior Member of IEEE.
 
 


 


W. Bruce Croft
NSF Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval
Computer Science Department
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Short biography

Bruce Croft is a Professor and Director of the NSF Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval in the Computer Science Department of the University of Massachusetts. He has published more than 80 articles in the areas of information retrieval, text analysis and indexing, interfaces, and file organizations.

The Center he directs is one of the major groups of people working in information retrieval, and has developed a number of collaborations with industry and government that have resulted in large-scale text-based information systems.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


 


Ralf Hartmut Gueting
University of Hagen
Germany

Short biography

Ralf Hartmut Gueting is currently (since 1989) a full professor in computer science at the University of Hagen, Germany. He received his Diplom and Dr.rer.nat. degrees from the University of Dortmund in 1980 and 1983, respectively, and became a professor at that university in 1987. From 1981 until 1984 his main research area was Computational Geometry. After a one-year stay at the IBM Almaden Research Center in 1985, extensible and spatial database systems became his major research interests.

His group has built a prototype of an extensible spatial DBMS, the Gral-System. He is the author of a text book on data structures and algorithms and has published about 35 articles in computational geometry and database systems. He recently was a guest editor of a special issue of the VLDB Journal on Spatial Database Systems.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


 


H.V. Jagadish
AT&T Bell Laboratories

Short biography

H. V. Jagadish received his Ph. D. from Stanford University in 1985, and since then has been with the Computing Systems Research Laboratory at AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ. His research interests encompass various aspects of data storage, retrieval, and use.

As a database researcher at a major telecommunications company, he has for the past several years been studying the use of database technology in a telecommunications network. The current tutorial is distilled from this work.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


 


Alberto O. Mendelzon
University of Toronto 

Short biography

Alberto Mendelzon did his undergraduate work at the University of Buenos Aires and obtained his Master's and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and has been since 1980 at the University of Toronto, where he is now Professor of Computer Science and member of the Computer Systems Research Institute. He has been a Visiting Scientist at the IBM Canada Centre for Advanced Studies and at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill.

He has chaired the program committee of the 1991 ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems and the Americas program committees of the 1992 International Conference on Very Large Databases and 1995 International Conference on Deductive and Object-Oriented Databases.

His research interests are in data visualization, query languages, and knowledge-base management. He has been a consultant for IBM Canada, Bell-Northern Research, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, the United Nations Development Programme, and Revenue Canada Taxation, among others.
 
 
 
 


 


Jan Paredaens
Universiteit Antwerpen

Short biography

Jan Paredaens studied mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Brussels and got a Ph. D. in 1974. He was a research member at Philips Lab in Brussels and became full professor at the University of Antwerp in 1979. He is also associated with the Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands. At these Universities he has research and educational positions in databases and fundamental aspects of computer sience.

Prof. Dr. J. Paredaens is author of five books in computer science, mainly on programming languages and databases. He also published about 100 papers in international journals, conferences and workshops. His research activities are mainly focussed on properties of relational and object-oriented databases, expressive power of query and update languages, visual interfaces for information processing and spatial databases.

He has been a member of the program committee of numerous international conferences and is involved in several international scientific journals.
 
 
 
 
 


 


Joachim W. Schmidt
Universitaet Hamburg

Short biography

After graduating from the University of Hamburg with a degree in physics and mathematics, Joachim Schmidt collaborated in the founding of the Department of Computer Science at that same university. From 1983 to 1989 he held a Professorship at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt, in late 1989 he returned to Hamburg University. The emphasis of his research and lecturing is devoted to databases, information systems, multimedia, programming languages and transaction-oriented systems.

Professor Schmidt is co-founder of the Springer Series Topics in Information Systems as well as being a founding member of the conference series "Extending Database Technology (EDBT)". His editorial activities extend to journals such as Information Systems, Programming Languages, Data and Knowledge, Distributed Computing and the VLDB Journal. He is co-initiator of the ESPRIT projects DAIDA and FIDE and the Network of Excellence IDOMENEUS.
 
 








Florian Matthes
Universitaet Hamburg

Short biography

Florian Matthes received his Master's degree in Computer Science from the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main. After graduating with a doctorate from the University of Hamburg in 1992, he went to the Digital Equipment Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, USA, with a post-doc fellowship where he worked with Luca Cardelli and Martin Abadi on type theory and extensible grammars. Currently, he holds a position equivalent to associate professor at Hamburg University .

The focus of his research and lecturing is on the design and implementation of database programming languages and on the construction of cooperative information systems. His work in these areas is funded by the European research projects FIDE-2, GIF and IDOMENEUS that focus on persistent programming languages, bulk data types and distributed multi-media applications, respectively.