2002 SIGMOD Contributions Award
Richard Snodgrass

Although Prof. Richard T. Snodgrass has performed a number of services to the field, including PC chair and TODS editorship, the work for which this award is made is his service as SIGMOD chair from 1997-2001. He took the lead to create the ACM/SIGMOD Digital Library, and personally built the necessary bridges to sister societies, in order to complete the project. Through the example of his leadership, the number of SIGMOD volunteers more than tripled, and SIGMOD membership itself began a significant upward trend.

Biography Richard T. Snodgrass joined the University of Arizona in 1989, where he is a Professor of Computer Science; previously he was a faculty member at the University of North Carolina. He holds a B.A. degree in Physics from Carleton College and received his doctorate in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He is an ACM Fellow. Rick is Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Database Systems. He has served on the editorial boards of VLDBJ and IEEE TKDE and has been a program chair of SIGMOD (1994) and VLDB (2001). He was ACM SIGMOD Chair from 1997 to 2001 and has chaired the ACM Publications Board and the ACM SIG Governing Board Portal Committee. Rick chaired the TSQL2 Language Design Committee and has worked with the ISO SQL3 committee to add temporal support to that language. He is author, co-author or editor of several books, including Developing Time-Oriented Database Applications in SQL, Advanced Database Systems, The TSQL2 Temporal Query Language and Temporal Databases: Theory, Design, and Implementation. He co-directs TIMECENTER, an international center for the support of temporal database applications on traditional and emerging DBMS technologies. His research interests include temporal databases, query language design, query optimization and evaluation, storage structures and database design.