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• Olaf Hartig has joined the group as a post-doctoral fellow as of 1 December 2012. He will be working with Tamer Özsu.
• Umar Farooq Minhas successfully defended his PhD thesis on 12 December 2012. The thesis title is "Scalable and Highly Available Database Systems in the Cloud".
• Mumtaz Ahmad successfully defended his PhD thesis on November 30, 2012. The thesis title is "Query Interactions in Database Systems".
• Frank Tompa has been awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal. Mitacs nominated Professor Tompa for this honour, in recognition of his "significant contributions to text data and design systems for maintaining large reference texts." (Nov-'12)
• Amr El-Helw successfully defended his PhD thesis on April 16, 2012. The thesis title is "Query Optimization in Dynamic Environments." Amr has been working at Greenplum since February 2012.
• Patrick Kling successfully defended his PhD thesis on April 9, 2012. Patrick's thesis is entitled "Distributed XML Query Processing" and studied end-to-end processing of a subclass of XPath queries in a cluster environment. Patrick has been working at Google in Waterloo since December 2011.
• Ashraf Aboulnaga, Umar Farooq Minhas, and Ken Salem, along with colleagues from the University of British Columbia, have won the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) 2011 for the paper entitled "RemusDB: Transparent High Availability for Database Systems." (Aug-'11)
• M. Tamer Özsu has been named a new Fellow of the IEEE "for his contributions to distributed data management and multimedia database systems" (Dec-'10).
• Frank Tompa has been named a new Fellow of the ACM "for his contributions to to text-dominated and semi-structured data management". Tompa is one of the 41 inductees from the world's leading universities, corporations, and research labs who have achieved accomplishments that are driving the innovations necessary to sustain competitiveness in the digital age, says ACM's online announcement (Dec-'10).
• Ashraf Aboulnaga has received an Early Researcher Award (ERA) from the Government of Ontario. The award is in support of his project entitled "Improving Database Management in Cloud Computing Environments." More information is available here and here. (19-Aug-'09)
• Iman Elghandour has been chosen as the first recipient of the Pat Selinger IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Award, presented to an exceptional woman Ph.D. student worldwide working in the area of database management. (18-Nov-'08)
• Ashraf Aboulnaga and Iman Elghandour's research project with the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS) has been been named the 2008 CAS Project of the Year. (18-Nov-'08)
• Ihab Ilyas has received an Early Researcher Award (ERA) from the Government of Ontario. The award is in support of his project entitled "Effective Retrieval and Cleaning of Uncertain Databases." More information is available here and here. (21-Jul-'08)
• Iman Elghandour has been awarded an IBM Ph.D. Fellowship. Iman's research focuses on automatic physical design for XML databases. (15-Feb-'08)
• Ken Salem has won the International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) 2007 Influential Paper Award. This award is given annually by the IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering to any paper that has appeared in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Data Engineering at least 10 years ago and has been influential in the community. More information here. (12-Apr-'07)
• Amr El-Helw has been awarded an IBM Ph.D. Fellowship. IBM's notification says "This award is highly competitive and recognizes your student as well as the quality of your institution." (15-Feb-'07)
• M. Tamer Özsu has been elected a Fellow of the ACM for his "contributions to distributed data management and service to the database community." (9-Jan-'07)
• Lukasz Golab has just been awarded the Alumni Gold Medal as the top PhD student at the university for his thesis titled, “Sliding Window Query Processing over Data Streams. More information is here. (9-Oct-'06)
• M. Tamer Özsu has received the 2006 ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award for his "service to the database research community, including leadership roles in the SIGMOD and VLDB organizations, and innovations in the publication process." More information is here. (29-Jun-'06)
• David Toman has received an Early Researcher Award (ERA) from the Ontario government. The award is in support of his project entitled "Support for XML & XQUERY in Relational Databases." More information is available in this press release. (9-Dec-'05)
• Lukasz Golab was awarded one of ten Bell Canada 125th Anniversary Scholarships at a ceremony at the Bell University Laboratory Symposium on November 8th. Lukasz's research focuses on a new type of database: a data stream management system (DSMS). DSMSs are used for processing streams of live data, such as Internet packet traces, stock price tickers, and sensor measurements. The fundamental problem that he is addressing in his thesis is query processing over sliding windows of recently collected stream data. More information about the scholarship is available from a Bell press release. (24-Nov-'05)
• A street in UW's north campus Research and Technology Park has been named "Frank Tompa Drive." The headquarters of Open Text Corporation, the company Prof. Tompa helped to found in 1991, will be located on the street. Read more... (12-Oct-'05)
• UW School of Computer Science tops the rankings among Canadian Computer Science departments in Science Citation Index impact rankings. Read more... (27-Sep-'05)
• Frank Tompa won the Award of Excellence in Graduate Student Supervision. This is a new award recently established by the Office of Graduate Studies in collaboration with the Graduate Student Association of UW. This award recognizes exemplary faculty members who have demonstrated excellence in graduate student supervision. Frank has supervised 20 PhD and 56 MMath students over the years. Read more... (26-Sep-'05)