The ACM-W Athena Lecturer Award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to Computer Science.
Jennifer received the award “For pioneering foundations, architecture, and applications of database systems.”
About this Award
The ACM-W Athena Lecturer Award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to Computer Science. Each year ACM will honor a preeminent woman computer scientist as the Athena Lecturer. Speakers are nominated by SIG officers. The Athena Lecturer will give a one-hour invited talk at an ACM conference determined by the speaker and the SIG which nominated her. A video of the talk will appear on the ACM website. The award includes travel expenses to the meeting and a $25,000 honorarium. Financial support for the Athena Lecturer Awards (2015-2016 through 2017-2018) is being provided by Google.
Jennifer Widom named ACM-W 2015-2016 Athena Lecturer
Jennifer Widom introduced the fundamental concepts and architectures of active database systems, a major area of research in the database field today. Active database systems allow application developers to embed logic into the database that allow actions to be executed when certain conditions are met. Active database systems have had a major impact on commercial database management systems, and most modern relational databases include active database features.
Widom made fundamental contributions to the study of semi-structured data management. Semi-structured data management systems are a key technology to support many advanced applications today, such as genomic databases, multimedia applications and digital libraries. Widom led the Lore project, which made important contributions on how to share, index and query semi-structured data sets, and developed the Lorel query language. Lorel has had a major impact on the research community, and many of its concepts have been applied to the design of query languages for XML data.
The Athena Lecturer is invited to present a lecture at an ACM event. Widom’s lecture will be delivered on June 2 at the 2015 ACM SIGMOD Conference in Melbourne, Australia.
Visit http://awards.acm.org/athena/ to read more about the award.