The International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT) presented the 2013 Test of Time Award to Phokion Kolaitis, professor of computer science in the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz, and his coauthors. The award recognizes a paper presented 10 years prior at the ICDT conference that has best met the "test of time."
The 2003 paper that earned the award is "Data Exchange: Semantics and Query Answering," by Ronald Fagin, Phokion G. Kolaitis, Renée J. Miller, and Lucian Popa.
The paper addresses the problem of transferring data between existing, independently created applications. The authors shed new light on the problem by proposing an elegant formal framework, introducing interesting notions, and presenting several contributions in terms of mathematical characterizations, algorithmic techniques, and computational complexity results. The paper initiated a new line of research and had a huge impact on research in the field of data management.
Kolaitis previously won a Test of Time Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS) for a paper published in 1998.
A Fellow of the ACM, Kolaitis has received several IBM research awards and has held a Guggenheim Fellowship. He earned a diploma in mathematics at the University of Athens and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics at UCLA. He joined the UCSC faculty in 1988.
