General Information

• Undergraduate internships: I am not going to be admitting any interns for the foreseeable future. Please do not write to me about internship as I will not be able to respond to individual emails.
• Graduate students: I am going to be admitting a graduate student in the 2014-15 academic year. Please do not write to me about graduate applications as I will not be able to respond to individual emails. I choose students from the pool of applicants. Simply apply and indicate "database systems" as your area of interest.
• Driving directions to Waterloo
• Campus map; Please park in the M lot.

Honours and Awards

• Fellow, Royal Society of Canada (2016)
• Elected Member, The Science Academy, Turkey (2013)
• Fellow, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) (2006)
• Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) (2010)
• University Research Chair, University of Waterloo (2004-2011)
• Test-of-Time Award, ACM SIGMOD 2015 for paper
  • L. Chen, M. T. Özsu, and V. Oria. "Robust and Fast Similarity Search for Moving Object Trajectories," In Proc. ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, 2005, pages 491-502.
• Best Paper Award Honorable Mention, 29th International Conference on Data Engineering, 2013 for paper
  • C. Balkesen, J. Teubner, G. Alonso, and M. T. Özsu. "Main-Memory Hash Joins on Multi-Core CPUs: Tuning to the Underlying Hardware," In Proc. 29th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, 2013, pages 362–373.
• ACM Distinguished Lecturer (2007-present)
• IBM CAS Canada Research Faculty Fellow (2010-present)
• Cheriton Faculty Fellow, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Waterloo (2013-2016)
• Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada Discovery Accelerator Award (2013)
• University of Waterloo Outstanding Performance Award (2004, 2009, 2014)
• Ohio State University College of Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award (2008)
• ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award (2006)
• Faculty Fellow, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Waterloo (2000-2003)
• McCalla Professor, University of Alberta (1993-1994)
• Sigma Xi – Scientific Research Society Member (1994-present)
• NATO Ph.D. scholarship through TÜ̈BITAK–The Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey (1979–1983)

Research

My research is on data management. Although I have done work in basic database technologies such as query processing, transaction processing, and database integration, the main focus of my research follows two threads: (1) application of database technology to non-traditional data types, and (2) distributed & parallel data management.

For more information click here.

Also see the following for a major project on digital media.

• Digital Media Enabling Technologies Project

Teaching

• Current Courses (Fall 2016)
  • CS 638 - Principles of Data Management and Use (On LEARN)
    • Until LEARN opens on September 8, click here for a temporary site.

• Past Graduate Courses

  • CS 638 - Principles of Data Management and Use (Fall 2015)
  • CS 755 - System and Network Architectures and Implementation (Fall 2013)
  • CS 655 - System and Network Architectures and Implementation (Spring 2012, Fall 2012) - Same course as above; this is the previous number.
  • CS 742 - Distributed and Parallel Database Systems (Winter 2013)

    I taught versions of this course as Parallel and Distributed Databases at ETH Zürich (Winter 2006) and at National University of Singapore (Fall 2010)

  • CS 748T - Distributed Database Systems (Winter 2001)
  • CS 848 - Modern Database Systems (Winter 2015)
  • CS 856 - Web Data Management (Fall 2002, Winter 2005)
  • CS 856 - Internet-Scale Distributed Data Management (Fall 2005)

• Past Undergraduate Courses

  • CS 348 - Introduction to Database Management (Fall 2012)
  • CS 338 - Computer Applications in Business: Databases (Fall 2013)
  • CS 448/648 - Introduction to Database Management (Winter 2001)
  • CS 454/654 - Distributed Systems (Winter 2002, Fall 2002, Winter 2004, Spring 2004, Fall 2004)

Vita

• Short biography
• Full CV (PDF Format)
• My academic geneology
• Some statistics
  • My Erdös number
  • My h-index
  • Scholar index
  • Google scholar

Publications

• Publications grouped by type
• Publications grouped by topic

Students, Research Staff and Visitors

• Current (Some pictures)
• Former

Current Activities

Books

• Principles of Distributed Database Systems, 3rd edition, Springer, 2011, ISBN 978-1-4419-8833-1.

  E-book version.
  Supplementary material (Presentation slides, JPEG figures, and solutions to some of the exercises. All of these, except for solutions to exercises, are also available from Springer site.
  You can also order it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Chapters-Indigo.

  Chinese translation by Prof. Li-Zhu Zhou published by Tsinghua University Press.

• Encyclopedia of Database Systems, Springer, 2009, ISBN 978-0-387-35544-3. See the DBLP page.
• ACM Books, Editor-in-Chief Follow @ACMBooks
• Springer Book Series on Web Information Systems Engineering and Internet Technologies, Editorial Board Member

Journals

• World Wide Web Journal, Editorial Board Member
• Knowledge and Information Systems, Editorial Board Member
• International Journal of Next-Generation Computing, Advisory Board Member

Professional Societies

• ACM Publications Board

Conferences

• PC Member, ICDE 2016 - 32nd International Conference on Data Engineering, Helsinki, Finland, May 16-20, 2016.
• PC Member, SIGMOD 2016 - ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, San Francisco, USA, June 26 - July 1, 2016.
• PC Member, BeyondMR 2016 - Workshop Algorithms and Systems for MapReduce and Beyond, San Francisco, USA, July 1, 2016.
• PC Member, BigCom 2016 - 2nd International Conference on Big Data Computing and Communications, Shenyang, China, July 29-31, 2016.
• PC Member, SISAP 2016 - 9th International Conference on Similarity Search and Applications, Tokyo, Japan, October 24-26, 2016.
• Senior PC Member, CIKM 2016 - 25th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Indianapolis, October 24-28, 2016.
• PVLDB Review Committee Member, Volume 10 (43rd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases), Munich, Germany, 2017.
• PC Member, SIGMOD 2017- ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, Raleigh, NC, USA, May 14-19, 2017.

Selected Past Activities

• Morgan & Claypool Synthesis Lectures on Data Management, Series Editor -- DBLP page for the series.
• Chair, ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD), 2001-2005.


• Trustee, VLDB Endowment, 1996-2002.


• Coordinating Editor-in-Chief, The VLDB Journal, 2001-2005 (Co-EIC: 1997-2001).
• Associate Editor, ACM Computing Surveys (2005-2009).
• Springer Book Series on Advanced Information & Knowledge Processing, Editorial Board Member (2002 - 2013)
• Information Technology and Management, Editorial Board Member (2000-2013)
• CRA Board of Directors, Canadian Association of Computer Science (CACS) Representative (2010-2013)

Personal Stuff & Hobbies

• Some pictures: Nuran, Allison-Umut-Emma, Shina, Shina & Umut, Shina & Nuran, My Honda
• I collect pens. For a partial list of the pens I own, click here.
  • Some of these are for sale. Click here to find out which ones.
• For a listing of important pen sites on the Web click here.