2007-08 Distinguished Speaker Series

Speaker Biography

Michael Stonebraker has been a pioneer of data base research and technology for more than a quarter of a century.  He was the main architect of the INGRES relational DBMS, the object-relational DBMS, POSTGRES, and the federated data system, Mariposa.  All three prototypes were developed at the University of California at Berkeley where Stonebraker was a Professor of Computer Science for twenty five years.  He is the founder of three successful Silicon Valley startups, whose objective was to commercialize these prototypes. 

Professor Stonebraker is the author of scores of research papers on data base technology, operating systems and the architecture of system software services.  He was awarded the prestigious ACM System Software Award in 1992, for his work on INGRES.  Additionally, he was awarded the first annual Innovation award by the ACM SIGMOD special interest group in 1994, and has been recognized by Forbes magazine as one of the 8 innovators driving the Silicon Valley wealth explosion during their 80th anniversary edition in 1998.  He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1998 and was awarded the IEEE John Von Neumann medal in 2005. 

Professor Stonebraker is presently an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at M.I.T. and is the founder and CTO of StreamBase Systems, as well as another startup currently in stealth mode.