Prof. Andy Pavlo Wins 2026 IEEE TCDE Ramez Elmasri Outstanding Database Education Award
Posted: May 15, 2026 ┃ Category: Awards
Pittsburgh, PA – The Carnegie Mellon Database Research Group is proud to announce that Prof. Andy Pavlo is the recipient of the 2026 IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering (TCDE) Ramez Elmasri Outstanding Database Education Award. The award is presented annually to an educator who has made exceptional contributions to database education. Over the last decade, Pavlo's freely available online courses and open educational materials have become foundational resources for students, engineers, and researchers worldwide studying database management systems. These Pittsburgh, PA – The Carnegie Mellon Database Research Group is proud to announce that Prof. Andy Pavlo is the recipient of the 2026 IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering (TCDE) Ramez Elmasri Outstanding Database Education Award. The award is presented Read More
Prof. Andy Pavlo wins 2021 VLDB Early Career Award
Posted: August 11, 2021 ┃ Category: Awards
Pittsburgh, PA — Databases are not a field in systems research or computer science. Databases are a lifestyle. At all points in one's life, you should consider whether whatever you are doing at that moment is contributing to humanity's knowledge and understanding of databases. If the answer is no, you should cease the activity and get back to working on what matters in life: database research. This is a tough choice. It means that children are going to be forgotten Pittsburgh, PA — Databases are not a field in systems research or computer science. Databases are a lifestyle. At all points in one's life, you should consider whether whatever you are doing at that moment is contributing to humanity's knowledge Read More
Huanchen Zhang Wins SIGMOD Jim Gray Dissertation Award
Posted: May 16, 2021 ┃ Category: Awards
Pittsburgh, PA — The Carnegie Mellon Database Group is pleased to announce that CS alumnus Prof. Huanchen Zhang (now faculty at Tsinghua University) has won the 2021 ACM SIGMOD Jim Gray Dissertation Award. This honor is conferred for the best dissertation in the field of databases for the previous year. Huanchen's thesis, entitled "Memory-Efficient Search Trees for Database Management Systems", develops new methods for reducing the memory overhead of search trees. Huanchen's thesis advisers were CMU CS faculty members David Pittsburgh, PA — The Carnegie Mellon Database Group is pleased to announce that CS alumnus Prof. Huanchen Zhang (now faculty at Tsinghua University) has won the 2021 ACM SIGMOD Jim Gray Dissertation Award. This honor is conferred for the best Read More
Joy Arulraj Wins SIGMOD Jim Gray Dissertation Award
Posted: April 27, 2019 ┃ Category: Awards
Pittsburgh, PA — The Carnegie Mellon Database Group is pleased to announce that CS alumnus Prof. Joy Arulraj (now faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology) has won the 2019 ACM SIGMOD Jim Gray Dissertation Award. This honor is conferred for the best dissertation in the field of databases for the previous year. Joy's thesis, entitled "The Design and Implementation of a Non-Volatile Memory Database Management Systems", is based on his work exploring new DBMS architectures for NVM. This was Pittsburgh, PA — The Carnegie Mellon Database Group is pleased to announce that CS alumnus Prof. Joy Arulraj (now faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology) has won the 2019 ACM SIGMOD Jim Gray Dissertation Award. This honor is conferred Read More
Prof. Andy Pavlo wins 2019 NSF CAREER Award
Posted: March 10, 2019 ┃ Category: Awards
Pittsburgh, PA — Complacency is our biggest enemy. It lulls the mind into laziness. It makes us not question how things should be because we take for granted that this how things have always been done. This is especially true in databases where the market is established and well-endowed incumbents are entrenched. Thus, it takes resolution and pluck to challenge this world and strive for something better. With this in mind, the CMU Database Group is pleased to announce that Pittsburgh, PA — Complacency is our biggest enemy. It lulls the mind into laziness. It makes us not question how things should be because we take for granted that this how things have always been done. This is especially true Read More
Carnegie Mellon Database Group Wins 2018 IEEE ICDM Test-of-Time Paper Award
Posted: November 11, 2018 ┃ Category: Awards
Singapore - The Carnegie Mellon Database Group is pleased to announce that their 2009 paper PEGASUS: A Peta-Scale Graph Mining System - Implementation and Observations has won the 2018 IEEE ICDM Test-of-Time Award. The authors were CMU Ph.D. students U Kang and Charalampos Tsourakakis, in collaboration with Prof. Christos Faloutsos. This paper on the PEGASUS project showed how to apply graph-mining algorithms on a Map-Reduce platform. The main insight was that a wide range of graph mining algorithms eventually require Singapore - The Carnegie Mellon Database Group is pleased to announce that their 2009 paper PEGASUS: A Peta-Scale Graph Mining System - Implementation and Observations has won the 2018 IEEE ICDM Test-of-Time Award. The authors were CMU Ph.D. students U Read More
Carnegie Mellon Database Group Wins 2018 SIGMOD Best Paper Award
Posted: May 22, 2018 ┃ Category: Awards
Houston, TX — When the dice are down on the pass and you are coming up with sevens, that's when you know your research is truly on point. No need for squabbling, no need for additional rolls. You got it done right the first time. The Carnegie Mellon Database Group is pleased to announce that their latest paper SuRF: Practical Range Query Filtering with Fast Succinct Tries has won the 2018 SIGMOD Best Paper Award. The paper's lead author author Houston, TX — When the dice are down on the pass and you are coming up with sevens, that's when you know your research is truly on point. No need for squabbling, no need for additional rolls. You got it Read More
Prof. Christos Faloutsos wins PAKDD Distinguished Contributions Award
Posted: May 14, 2018 ┃ Category: Awards
Prof. Christos Faloutsos attracted the PAKDD Distinguished Contribution Award, in the upcoming PAKDD 2018, in Melbourne, Australia. Quote from the conference web site: The Steering Committee considers it an honor to award the PAKDD Distinguished Contributions Award for 2018 to Professor Christos Faloutsos, for his many seminal contributions to the field of data mining, including time series matching, network analysis, graph computation, and their scalability. Especially notable is his highly successful program in showing how strong mathematical results can be Prof. Christos Faloutsos attracted the PAKDD Distinguished Contribution Award, in the upcoming PAKDD 2018, in Melbourne, Australia. Quote from the conference web site: The Steering Committee considers it an honor to award the PAKDD Distinguished Contributions Award for 2018 to Read More
Prof. Andy Pavlo wins 2018 Joel & Ruth Spira Teaching Award
Posted: April 6, 2018 ┃ Category: Awards
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — A great philosopher was once asked what their ultimate goal was. Without a notice of hesitation, the philosopher replied that right now he did not feel that he was getting what he wanted. But at some later point when he received a small amount of accolades, then that was when the world would know that it is on. Indeed, this is because (without trying to brag too much) he knew that he had something that the world Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — A great philosopher was once asked what their ultimate goal was. Without a notice of hesitation, the philosopher replied that right now he did not feel that he was getting what he wanted. But at some later Read More
Prof. Andy Pavlo wins 2017 Google Faculty Research Award
Posted: March 20, 2018 ┃ Category: Awards
Mountain View, California — Science is a dirty game. People get hurt. Marriages get broken. Mix tapes get dropped. But in the end one is able to move humanity forward and make a difference. This is why we do database. This is why we get up in the morning for the research grind. Maybe there is a better life out there, but frankly we do not want to hear it. Given this, the CMU Database Group is pleased to announce Mountain View, California — Science is a dirty game. People get hurt. Marriages get broken. Mix tapes get dropped. But in the end one is able to move humanity forward and make a difference. This is why we do database. Read More