The American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected 204 new members across a number of categories, including eight computer scientists.
One of these eight was IBM Fellow Ron Fagin, for his breakthrough work. Election to the American Academy is considered one of the nation’s highest honors since its founding during the American Revolution, when its first class included George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.
“Former
Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, a college friend of mine, was also elected
this year for his work in public affairs. So, it was a thrill to get an email
from Reich saying ‘Somehow I always knew we'd end up at the same induction
ceremony, fifty years after we met’,” Ron said.
The American Academy recognized Ron for the following
accomplishments:
- Established
the field of finite-model theory, connecting mathematical logic, complexity
theory, and database theory, and elaborated Fagin's theorem and Fagin's
zero-one law.
- Founding
figure of relational database theory underlying the success of relational
databases.
- Introduced
fundamental concepts for database design, especially: fourth normal form,
multivalued dependencies, and acyclic schemas, and invented an
extendible-hashing algorithm used to find data quickly.
- Invented
algorithms for querying and aggregating imprecise data, key capabilities for information
retrieval systems.
- Created
the foundations for data integration and transformation with his work on data
exchange and tuple-generating dependencies, considered the most significant
development in database theory over the last decade.
- Invented
a highly scalable, widely used method for differential backup of files, and an
algorithm for assigning encryption keys, techniques crucial to IBM products.
- Developed
a logical foundation to reasoning about group knowledge and coauthored
Reasoning about Knowledge (2d ed. 2003), now considered a classic on knowledge
in multi-agent systems.
Ron is an IBM Fellow, which is IBM's highest
technical honor. There are currently 87 active IBM Fellows, and there have been
only 257 IBM Fellows in the 51-year history of the program. Ron received his B.A. in mathematics from Dartmouth College
and his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University
of California at Berkeley. He has won an IBM Corporate Award,
eight IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards, an IBM Outstanding Technical
Achievement Award, and two IBM key patent awards. He is a Fellow of IEEE, ACM,
and AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science). He has
co-authored three papers that won Best Paper Awards and three papers that won
Test-of-time Awards, all in major conferences. One of his papers won the 2014 Gödel Prize. He
was named Docteur Honoris Causa by the University of Paris,
and a "Highly Cited Researcher" by ISI (the Institute for Scientific
Information). He won the IEEE Technical Achievement Award, IEEE W. Wallace
McDowell Award, and ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award (a lifetime
achievement award in databases). In addition to the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, this
year he was also elected to the US
National Academy of Engineering.
Labels: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fagin's Theorum, ibm fellow, ibm research almaden, Ron Fagin