Biographical sketches of authors

Anant Jhingran IBM Research Division, Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, California 95120 (electronic mail: anant@almaden.ibm.com). Dr. Jhingran is the Director of Computer Science: Foundations, Software, and Services at IBM's Almaden Research Center. He manages a team of about 150 researchers working on data management, the Web, human-computer interaction, knowledge management, and computer science theory. Previously, he was Senior Manager of e-Commerce and data management at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He has been with IBM since 1990. He received his Ph.D. degree in 1990, from the University of California at Berkeley, in the area of database systems, and his bachelor's degree in 1985, from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, in electrical engineering. He is a member of the ACM and a senior member of the IEEE. He has published several papers in leading database conferences such as SIGMOD, VLDB, and Data Engineering, and he served on the program committees of many of these conferences. He has won several IBM awards, including a Corporate Award for “DB2 Common Database Servers.” He also holds several patents and is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology.

Nelson Mattos IBM Software Group, Silicon Valley Laboratory, 555 Bailey Avenue, San Jose, California 95141 (electronic mail: mattos@us.ibm.com). Dr. Mattos, IBM Distinguished Engineer, is director of information integration at the IBM Silicon Valley Laboratory, where he is responsible for establishing IBM's leadership position in the emerging information integration market. Additionally, he is responsible for IBM's participation at different standards forums, including the ANSI SQL committee, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Committee for database, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Object Management Group (OMG), and Embedded SQL in Java^® (SQLJ). In this capacity, he contributed extensively to the design of SQL99 through more than 300 accepted proposals. Before joining IBM, Dr. Mattos was an associate professor at the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany, where he was involved in research on object-oriented and knowledge base management systems and received a Ph.D. degree in computer science. He also holds bachelor of science and master of science degrees from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. Dr. Mattos has published over 75 papers on database management and related topics and is the author of the book, An Approach to Knowledge Base Management.

Hamid Pirahesh IBM Research Division, Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, California 95120 (electric mail: pirahesh@almaden.ibm.com). Dr. Pirahesh is an IBM Fellow and a senior manager responsible for the exploratory database department at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. He is also the manager of the DataBase Technology Institute (DBTI) at IBM Research. He has direct responsibilities for various aspects of the IBM DB2 product, including architecture, design, and development. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Los Angeles in the area of database systems. He is an IBM master inventor and a member of the IBM Academy of Technology. He is also an associate editor of ACM Computing Surveys and has served on the program committees of major computer conferences. He was a principal member of the original team that designed the query processing architecture of the IBM DB2 Universal Database^TM relational database management system and delivered the product to the marketplace. He has made major contributions to query language industry standards. His work optimization using aggregate data caching has resulted in dramatic performance improvement. This feature is now considered to be essential for processing of complex data analysis and OLAP queries in large databases. His research areas include OLAP and aggregate data management, query optimization, data warehousing, Web services, management of semi-structured and unstructured XML data, and information integration in Web-based federated and distributed systems. He also serves as a consultant to various IBM product divisions, including the software division and IBM Global Services.