Alberto O. Mendelzon

The ACM PODS Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award was established in 2007 and was awarded for the first time in 2008. It is awarded every year to a paper or a small number of papers published in the PODS proceedings ten years prior that had the most impact in terms of research, methodology, or transfer to practice over the intervening decade.

Since 2006, the Alberto Mendelzon International Workshop on Foundation of Databases and the Web (AMW) brings together top researchers from all over the world, creating the opportunity to discuss and spread research results.

Alberto O. Mendelzon was an Argentine-Canadian computer scientist who died on June 16, 2005.

More recently, Mendelzon was a central figure in the work on view-based querying. Starting with the innovative LMSS95 paper (Levy, Mendelzon, Sagiv, and Srivastava, PODS 1995) that introduced the problem of answering queries using views, Alberto Mendelzon made several important contributions to the emerging area of view-based modeling and processing.

Mendelzon was an active member of both the database theory and database systems research communities. He served as the PC Chair for ACM PODS in 1991 and as General Chair in both 1997 and 1998. He served as PC Chair for VLDB in 1992, and as a member of the SIGMOD Executive Committee from 1998 to 2001. He was a member of the Royal Society of Canada.

In the 1980s, Mendelzon began an important line of work on graphical query languages. His work has been called prescient as it began before the World Wide Web, and nonetheless established many of the scientific principles required for designing languages to query the Web.

Mendelzon established some of the earliest results on using the relational data model. Together with his thesis advisor, Jeffrey Ullman, and fellow Princeton students, including David Maier and Yehoshua Sagiv, he co-authored a number of influential papers that laid out the fundamental issues and approaches for relational databases. In a now-famous paper (Maier, Mendelzon and Sagiv, TODS 1979), he introduced the chase, a method for testing implication of data dependencies that is now of widespread use in the database theory literature. This work has been highly influential: it is used, directly or indirectly, on an everyday basis by people who design databases, and it is used in commercial systems to reason about the consistency and correctness of a data design. New applications of the chase in meta-data management and data exchange are still being discovered.

Alberto Mendelzon was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He graduated from the University of Buenos Aires in 1973. He then received a Ph.D. degree from Princeton University in 1979, where his advisor was Jeffrey Ullman. After that he was a post-doctoral fellow at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center for a year before joining the faculty of the University of Toronto in 1980.