1992 SIGMOD Contributions Award
Maria Zemankova

Maria Zemankova received her B.S. (with Highest Honors) in Mathematics and Computing with minor in Psychology from the American University in Cairo in 1977, and M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Florida State University in 1979 and 1983, respectively.

From 1984 to 1988 she was on faculty of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She served as the director for the Database and Expert Systems Program at the National Science Foundation during 1989-93. She was instrumental in the conception of initiatives "Research on Scientific Databases" and "Digital Libraries." She spent a year with the MITRE Corporation in McLean, Virginia as a Principal Scientist in the area of information systems, and returned to NSF in Fall 1994. She served as the Deputy Division Director for the Information, Robotics and Intelligent Systems Fall 1995 - Fall 1997.

Her research interests are in intelligent information systems, knowledge discovery in scientific databases, information organization and tailored information access/delivery in digital libraries, evolutionary information systems, organization and process modeling in information systems, and management of uncertainty, reasoning and learning in knowledge-based systems.