Martin Kersten

Martin Kersten

2014 SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award

Professor Dr. Martin Kersten is the recipient of the 2014 SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovation Award for influential contributions to database architectures, most notably for pioneering work on columnar, in-memory, and hardware-conscious database technology.

Details: Martin Kersten started his career in computer science as research assistant in 1975. As of 1979 he was scientific researcher and lecturer at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Until 1985 he worked on database security, database programming languages and he developed a relational DBMS, which became a component of a commercial CASE environment from 1985-1991. He was visiting researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, in 1980 and 1983. He moved to CWI in 1985 to establish the Database Research Group. Between 1986 and 1990 he was co-designer of the PRISMA database machine, a RDBMS for a 100-node multiprocessor. In a follow up ESPRIT-II he was responsible for the development of an enhanced version of SQL to cater with documents and geographical data. From 1989-1993 he led a national project on the exploitation of the Amoeba distributed system for advanced database management and a national project on database design formalizations. As of April 1992 he is head of the department of Information Systems. At the same time he started the ESPRIT-III Pythagoras project aimed at performance quality assessment of advanced database systems. He remained associate professor at the Vrije Universiteit teaching advanced courses on database technology until mid 1994. Since 1992 he is also associate professor at the University of Amsterdam and became a full professor in multimedia databases as of January 1994. Currently he is head of department involving 55 researchers in areas covering datamining and data warehousing, multimedia information systems, visualization, quantum computing and advanced systems research. He is a co-founder of Data Distilleries sold to SPSS in 2003. He has published ca. 140 scientific papers. He is an active reviewer for ESPRIT projects and scientific publications. Moreover, he is a trustee of the VLDB Endowment board, which is responsible for the development of database research worldwide.