1998 SIGMOD Contributions Award
Won Kim

Dr. Won Kim is the founder and CEO of Cyber Database Solutions. In 1990 he founded UniSQL, Inc., and successfully managed the company as CEO and Chairman for six years. He ushered in the era of object-relational database technology by conceiving and architecting the first commercial object-relational database server and the first commercial object-relational multidatabase server.

Prior to founding UniSQL, he led the object-oriented database research laboratory at MCC (Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, a R&D Consortium) for six years, where he conceived and architected one of the first object-oriented database systems in the world, and laid the foundation for object-oriented database technology.

Dr. Kim currently serves as the Chairman of ACM SIGKDD, International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, and the publication of a semi-annual technical newsletter, Explorations. He also serves as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, a scholarly journal on Internet foundational software technology and the societal impacts of the Internet. He is an ACM Fellow who serves on the Technical Advisory Board of technology companies, including Interactive Silicon, Inc., and KT Data.

He has published over 130 research and technical papers in international journals, conferences, and trade journals. He has also published four books, including Modern Database Systems, by Addison-Wesley/ACM Press, and Introduction to Object-Oriented Databases, by MIT Press.

He previously served for 12 years as the Editor-in-Chief and Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Database Systems, the premier scholarly journal for research scientists in the field of database systems. He served for 8 years as Chairman of ACM SIGMOD, the premier professional society of professionals and students specializing in the theory, development, and use of database management systems.

Dr. Kim received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. His Ph.D. dissertation was on "Query Optimization in Relational Database Systems." He received his B.S. and M.S. simultaneously from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.