ACM Council on Women honors Jennifer Widom as innovator in database systems

The Association for Computing Machinery’s Council on Women in Computing (ACM-W), has named Stanford Engineering’s Jennifer Widom the 2015-2016 Athena Lecturer for pioneering foundations, architecture and applications of database systems.

Widom, Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs and Fletcher Jones Professor in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, introduced active database systems, a major area of research in the database field. Her work with semistructured data has also been extremely influential and has led to the popularization of XML and query languages for XML data. She has made contributions to streaming data management, data integrity, data lineage, data accuracy and uncertainty, and crowd-sourced data management.

The Athena Lecturer award, named for the Greek goddess of wisdom, celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. It includes a $25,000 honorarium provided by Google Inc.

“Jennifer Widom has had a profound impact on the database field,” said Judith Olson, who leads the ACM-W awards committee. “Her contributions have influenced both the direction of research and of commercial products. But just as important, she is passionate about teaching, be it in the classroom or through her highly successful series of MOOCs (massive open online classes).”

Widom, a former chair of the Department of Computer Science, introduced the fundamental concepts and architectures of active database systems, a major area of research in the database field. Active database systems enable application developers to embed logic into the database that allow actions to be executed when certain conditions are met. Active database systems have had a major impact on commercial database management systems, and most modern relational databases include active database features.

Widom made fundamental contributions to the study of semistructured data management. Semistructured data management systems are a key technology to support many advanced applications, such as genomic databases, multimedia applications and digital libraries. Widom led the Lore project, which made important contributions on how to share, index and query semistructured data sets, and developed the Lorel query language. Lorel has had a major impact on the research community, and many of its concepts have been applied to the design of query languages for XML data.

Widom has made valuable contributions to data provenance, managing uncertain data, query processing on data streams, combining databases and the web, and data transformation and data warehouses, in addition to her work on active and semistructured database systems.

Widom is the author of more than 150 refereed conference and journal articles on database management systems. She has published many highly cited and influential papers, and several of her papers have received awards years after publication for their lasting scientific significance.

Widom has co-authored textbooks widely used for teaching database systems design, use and implementation. She has served as editor of ACM Transactions on Database Systems, VLDB Journal and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

An ACM Fellow, Widom is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. She received the SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award and was a Guggenheim Fellow.

Widom is a graduate of the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and earned a PhD in computer science from Cornell University. Before joining the Stanford Engineering faculty, she was a research staff member at the IBM Almaden Research Center.

The Athena Lecturer is invited to present a lecture at an ACM event. Widom’s lecture will be delivered June 2 at the 2015 ACM SIGMOD Conference in Melbourne, Australia. The 2015-2016 Athena Lecturer award will be presented at the ACM Annual Awards Banquet on June 20 in San Francisco.