Abstract:

In this talk, Professor Navathe will explain the milestones of database technology during the past five decades. He will point out how the industry has been a main influencer in making the science of databases, and the results of research, available for the masses. He will highlight the various models and systems that were proposed, and how the whole field has been a partnership between universities and industry.

Professor Navathe will also explore some of the exciting technological developments that did not gain ground due to non-technical reasons, and lack of industrial support. Furthermore, he will comment on the work of the Turing Award winners in the database area and highlight the ideas that have lasted the test of time. He will describe the challenges that today’s established products are facing due to the emerging applications and will point out the ongoing developments and the future trends of this technology. 

Bio:

A professor and the founder of the database research group at the Georgia Tech School of Computer Science, Sham Navathe was the first faculty hire of the newly formed College of Computing. Navathe is known for his work on data modeling, database design, data distribution and database integration methodologies, and database query and interface paradigms. He has also contributed to Bioinformatics in terms of a mitochondrial genome database and text analytic and data mining techniques with genomic and clinical data.

Navathe was program co-chair of ACM SIGMOD 1985 International Conference (Austin) and General Co-chair of the IFIP WG 2.6 Data Semantics Workshop (Atlanta) in 1995. He was the General Co-chair of the 1996 International VLDB conference in Bombay, India. He has served on the VLDB foundation and has been on the steering committees of several conferences. In addition to his conference leadership roles, Navathe has been an associate editor of a number of journals including ACM Computing Surveys, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge, and Data Engineering and Information Systems (Elsevier). He is the author of the textbook “Fundamentals of Database Systems” (with R. Elmasri) – which is the leading database textbook worldwide, translated into 14 languages and in its 7th Edition (2016). He also co-authored the book "Conceptual Design: An Entity Relationship Approach" (Addison Wesley, 1992) with Carlo Batini and Stefano Ceri.

His current interest is in database applications related to healthcare and visual interfaces to databases. Navathe holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Navathe is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM-2014) and the recipient of the IEEE Computer Science, Engineering and Education Impact award in 2015.