Prof. Sham Navathe

University of British Columbia, Canada

Sham Navathe is a professor and the founder of the database research group at the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, USA. 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 (mitomap.org) and text analytic and data mining techniques with genomic and clinical data. 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 was the program co-chair of ACM SIGMOD 1978 International Conference (Austin) and General Co-chair of the IFIP WG 2.6 Data Semantics Workshop (Atlanta) in 1995. He was also the General Co-chair of the 1996 International VLDB conference in Bombay. He has served on the VLDB foundation and has been on the steering committees of several conferences including the ER conference. He has been an associate editor of a number of journalsincluding ACM Computing Surveys, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineeringand Information Systems (Elsevier). 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 large databases. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Navathe is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and the recipient of the IEEE Computer Science, Engineering and Education Impact award in 2015.

Title: Perspectives on Database Systems and Research: the last five decades

Prof. Navathe claims a unique advantage of being involved with the database systems and application development fieldright from its infancy till today. In this talk he will touch upon the milestones of database technology during the last (which also happens to be the first) five decades. He will point out how industry has been influential in making the science of databases and the results of research available to the masses by engineering the products in certain ways. He will highlight the various models and systems that were proposed and how the whole field is making a comeback to old concepts with new flavors. He will include some of the exciting technological developments that did not gain ground because the database product vendors chose not to support them.He will comment on the work of the Turing Award winners in database area and highlight the ideas that have met the test of time. He will finally describe the challenges that today’s established products are facing and the turn the industry has taken dominated by emerging applications.