Raghu Ramakrishnan got his B.Tech. from IIT Madras in 1983 and his Ph.D. from
the University of Texas at Austin in 1987. He has been a member of the
Database Systems Group
in the Computer Sciences Department
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1987, and is a
co-founder of the UW Data Mining Institute. In 1999, he
founded QUIQ, a company that developed innovative collaborative customer support and knowledge management
solutions used by companies such as Business Objects, Compaq,
National Instruments, Network Appliances, Sun Microsystems, and others, and served as the Chairman
and CTO until 2003, when QUIQ was acquired by Kanisa.
His research is in the area of database systems,
with a focus on data retrieval and integration,
analysis, and mining, and is often
done in collaboration with researchers in industry.
He led the CORAL project, which developed and distributed the CORAL deductive
system, and contributed to recursive
query language extensions in the SQL:1999 standard.
He and his group have developed scalable algorithms for
clustering, decision-tree construction, and itemset counting, and
were among the first to investigate
mining of continuously evolving and streaming
data. His work on query optimization
has found its way into
several commercial database systems, and his work on extending SQL to deal
with queries over sequences has influenced the design of window functions in
SQL:1999. None of this would have been possible without a great group of former
students;
of all his contributions, he is proudest of this list.
Ramakrishnan
was elected
Fellow of
the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2001,
Fellow of the IEEE in 2008,
and has received several awards, including a
David and Lucile Packard Foundation
Fellowship in Science and Engineering, a
Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT-Madras, an
NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award,
Faculty awards from IBM, Microsoft and Xerox,
and an
ACM
SIGMOD Contributions Award. He was selected as a Vilas Associate at the
University of Wisconsin in 1999.
He has written the widely-used
text Database Management Systems (WCB/McGraw-Hill), now in its third edition
(with J. Gehrke). A list of his papers is available
here.
He is Chair of
ACM SIGMOD (Management of Data),
on the Board
of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment and
the Board of Directors of ACM
SIGKDD (Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining),
an associate editor of ACM Transactions on
Database Systems, recently served as editor-in-chief of the
Journal of
Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery,
and has maintained the dbworld
mailing list since creating it in 1987.