Professor Juliana Freire Wins the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award
We’re excited to announce that CDS faculty member Juliana Freire, who is a professor of computer science, engineering and data science, has won the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award alongside NYU colleague and Julius Silver professor of computer science at the Courant Institute, Dennis Shasha. The award recognizes their innovative work in the data management community to encourage scientific reproducibility. Reproducibility evaluation was introduced at the 2008 SIGMOD Conference and since then has influenced how the community approaches experimental evaluation and it has also influenced similar efforts within ACM.
ACM’s (Association for Computing Machinery) SIGMOD (Special Interest Group on Management of Data) is an organization with a focus on data management technology and the methods, principles, and applications of database management systems. The SIGMOD 2020 Contributions Award honors the outstanding work and achievement of remarkable researchers in the database management community.
Here’s a bit on Professor Freire’s background and prior achievements. She holds M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Stony Brook University, New York. Her research interests are in large-scale data analysis, curation and integration, visualization, provenance management, and web information discovery. She has made fundamental contributions to data management methods and tools that address problems introduced by emerging applications including urban analytics and computational reproducibility.
Freire has published over 200 technical papers (including 8 award-winning papers), several open-source systems, and is an inventor of 12 U.S. patents. She is an ACM Fellow and a recipient of an NSF CAREER, two IBM Faculty awards, and a Google Faculty Research award.
Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, Sloan Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, W. M. Keck Foundation, Google, Amazon, AT&T Research, Microsoft Research, Yahoo! and IBM.
In July 2017, she became the first woman to serve as SIGMOD elected chair. She is also a council member of the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC), an organization whose objective is to empower the U.S. computing research community to conduct and advance high-impact research. Until recently, she was executive director and lead investigator of NYU’s Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment, a shared partnership with NYU and several universities with the common goal of advancing data-intensive scientific discovery.
For more information on Professor Freire, please visit her NYU Tandon profile. To learn more about SIGMOD and the SIGMOD Contributions Award, please visit the ACM SIGMOD website.
By Ashley C. McDonald
