2012 SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award

ACM SIGMOD is pleased to present the 2012 SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award to F. Ryan Johnson. Johnson completed his dissertation titled “Scalable Storage Managers for the Multicore Era” at Carnegie Mellon University. Johnson’s dissertation is a tour de force in identifying bottlenecks when scaling OLTP systems to many cores, proposing innovative solutions to each of them. The ideas in the thesis such as speculative lock inheritance, new techniques for combining log requests, and data-oriented transaction execution are highly innovative, and the work is remarkable for its breadth, depth, thorough implementation, and evaluation.

Ryan Johnson is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto specializing in systems aspects of database engines, particularly in the context of modern hardware. He graduated with M.S. and PhD degrees in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2010, after completing a B.S. in Computer Engineering at Brigham Young University in 2004. In addition to his work with database systems, Johnson has interests in computer architecture, operating systems, compilers, and hardware design.

SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Honorable Mention

ACM SIGMOD is also pleased to recognize Bogdan Alexe for an Honorable Mention for the 2012 SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award. Alexe completed his dissertation titled “Interactive and Modular Design of Schema Mappings” at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Alexe’s dissertation makes substantial contributions to the important problem of designing schema mappings through novel principled algorithms and the first benchmark in this area.

Bogdan Alexe is a researcher at IBM Research – Almaden. His work focuses on large scale entity resolution and integration. His past research covered topics in information integration, data exchange and schema mappings. Bogdan graduated with a Ph.D. from University of California at Santa Cruz, and an M.Sc. from Ecole Polytechnique/Telecom ParisTech, both in Computer Science.