Computer scientist Vardi receives Test-of-Time Award

Computer scientist Vardi receives Test-of-Time award

BY PATRICK KURP
Special to the Rice News

Moshe Vardi, the Karen Ostrum George Professor in Computational Engineering and director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology, has received one of the inaugural 2008 ACM PODS Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Awards for a paper he co-authored in 1998.

MOSHE VARDI

The award was given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS). Vardi shares the honor with his co-author, Phokion Kolaitis, the senior manager of the Computer Science Principles and Methodologies Department at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif.

The paper, ”Conjunctive-Query Containment and Constraint Satisfaction,” was published in the Proceedings of PODS 1998. It relates two important problems in the areas of databases and artificial intelligence and provides a deep complexity analysis.

The paper was lauded for having ”the most impact (in terms of research, methodology or transfer to practice) over the intervening decade.”

Also honored were Serge Abiteboul and Oliver M. Duschka for their paper ”Complexity of Answering Queries Using Materialized Views.”

In 2007, the PODS executive committee established the Test-of-Time award, named in honor of the late Alberto O. Mendelzon, professor of computer and mathematical sciences at the University of Toronto