2004 SIGMOD Contributions Award
Surajit Chaudhuri

Surajit Chaudhuri received the 2004 SIGMOD Contribution Award for creating and maintaining the conference management tool (CMT). CMT was first released in 1999, and has since then become the tool of choice for a large number of mainstream conferences in the database area and beyond. In particular, the ACM SIGMOD Conference, the VLDB Conference, and the Data Engineering Conference have all used CMT throughout the last few years. CMT has established itself as a de facto standard for supporting the program committee work of these leading conferences in our field.

Chaudhuri not only developed the original version of CMT, but, most importantly, has continuously provided maintenance and support, and has added major features upon request by individual conferences. CMT has evolved into one of the most versatile program-committee support tools available today. Chaudhuri has invested an enormous amount of effort into this contribution, on a purely voluntary basis, deserving this recognition by the database community.

Biography Surajit Chaudhuri is a Senior Researcher and leads the Data Management and Exploration Group at Microsoft Research. His areas of interest include self-tuning database systems, query optimization, data cleaning, and integration of text and relational data. In collaboration with his colleagues in Microsoft Research and the SQL Server team, he helped incorporate the Index Tuning Wizard (1998, 2000), Data Mining API(2000), and data cleaning technology (to appear) in SQL Server. As his work outside of work, he is responsible for CMT, the conference management service hosted by Microsoft Research since 1999 for the academic community. Prior to joining Microsoft Research, Surajit worked at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto. Surajit has a PhD from Stanford University.