Biographical sketches of authors

Volker Markl IBM Research Division, Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, California 95120 (electronic mail: marklv@us.ibm.com). Dr. Markl is a research staff member in the Advanced Database Solutions Department at the Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, conducting research in query optimization, indexing, and self-managing databases. Dr. Markl is spearheading the LEO project at IBM, an effort in autonomic computing with the goal of creating a self-tuning optimizer for DB2. Dr. Markl holds a Ph.D. degree and M.S. degree in computer science from Technische Universität München, as well as a degree in business administration from Universität Hagen, Germany. In his earlier professional career, Dr. Markl coinvented and developed the enabling indexing technology for the relational database management system TransBase HyperCube, which was awarded the European Information Society Technology Prize in 2001 by the European Commission.

Guy M. Lohman IBM Research Division, Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, California 95120 (electronic mail: lohman@almaden.ibm.com). Dr. Lohman is manager of advanced optimization in the Advanced Database Solutions Department at the Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, and has 20 years of experience in relational query optimization. He is the architect of the Optimizer of the DB2 Universal Database (UDB) for Linux, UNIX, and Windows, and was responsible for its development in Versions 2 and 5. During that period, Dr. Lohman also managed the overall effort to incorporate into the DB2 UDB product the Starburst compiler technology that was prototyped at the Almaden Research Center. More recently, he was a coinventor and designer of the DB2 Index Advisor, and cofounder of the DB2 SMART (Self-Managing And Resource Tuning) project, part of IBM's autonomic computing initiative. In 2002, Dr. Lohman was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology. His current research interests involve query optimization and self-managing database systems.

Vijayshankar Raman IBM Research Division, Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, California 95120 (electronic mail: ravijay@us.ibm.com). Dr. Raman is a research staff member at the Almaden Research Center, with a focus on data management issues in grid computing, and on adaptive query optimization. He is also interested in algorithmic mechanism design, and in data cleaning and integration. Dr. Raman graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001 with a Ph.D. degree in computer science, specializing in database management systems. His research resulted in a dozen refereed papers in international conferences and journals, one of which was selected as one of the best papers at the 25th International Conference on Very Large Databases. One component of his research has evolved into the Potter's Wheel open source data cleaning software. Dr. Raman was awarded a Microsoft Fellowship during his graduate study. He also won an AT&T Asia-Pacific Leadership Award for achievements during his undergraduate study at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.