ACM-W Names Jennifer Widom 2015-2016 Athena Lecturer
April 7, 2015
The ACM-W Council on Women in Computing has named Jennifer Widom of Stanford University as the 2015-2016 Athena Lecturer for pioneering foundations, architecture, and applications of database systems. Widom introduced active database systems, a major area of research in the database field today. Her work with semi-structured data has 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, and data accuracy and uncertainty.
An ACM Fellow, Jennifer Widom is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where she currently also serves as Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs in the School of Engineering. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, she was a Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center. 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 (TODS), VLDB Journal, and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE). A frequent keynote speaker, she has served on the program committees of a variety of technical conferences, and as program chair for the ACM SIGMOD and the VLDB conferences.
The Athena Lecturer award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science, and includes a $25,000 honorarium provided by Google Inc. ACM will present the award at its annual Awards Banquet on June 20 in San Francisco, California.
