Ron Fagin Speaks Out on His Trajectory as a Database Theoretician

Abstract

Welcome ACM SIGMOD Record's series of interviews with distinguished members of the database community. I'm Marianne Winslett, and today we are in Snowbird, Utah, USA, site of the 2014 SIGMOD and PODS conference. I have here with me Ron Fagin, who has spent many years as a researcher at IBM. He is an IBM Fellow. He is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has won the IEEE McDowell Award (the highest award of the IEEE Computer Society), the IEEE Technical Achievement Award, and the SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award, and he has won a bunch of Best Paper and Test-of-Time Awards. He was named Docteur Honoris Causa by the University of Paris. Most recently, he won the Gödel Prize in 2014. Ron's Ph.D. is in mathematics, from Berkeley