Alain Colmerauer was a French computer scientist. He was a professor at Aix-Marseille University, and the creator of the logic programming language Prolog.
Datalog is a declarative logic programming language. While it is syntactically a subset of Prolog, Datalog generally uses a bottom-up rather than top-down evaluation model. This difference yields significantly different behavior and properties from Prolog. It is often used as a query language for deductive databases. Datalog has been applied to problems in data integration, networking, program analysis, and more.
Database theory encapsulates a broad range of topics related to the study and research of the theoretical realm of databases and database management systems.
Descriptive complexity is a branch of computational complexity theory and of finite model theory that characterizes complexity classes by the type of logic needed to express the languages in them. For example, PH, the union of all complexity classes in the polynomial hierarchy, is precisely the class of languages expressible by statements of second-order logic. This connection between complexity and the logic of finite structures allows results to be transferred easily from one area to the other, facilitating new proof methods and providing additional evidence that the main complexity classes are somehow "natural" and not tied to the specific abstract machines used to define them.
Finite model theory is a subarea of model theory. Model theory is the branch of logic which deals with the relation between a formal language (syntax) and its interpretations (semantics). Finite model theory is a restriction of model theory to interpretations on finite structures, which have a finite universe.
In computer science, the expressive power of a language is the breadth of ideas that can be represented and communicated in that language. The more expressive a language is, the greater the variety and quantity of ideas it can be used to represent.
Moshe Ya'akov Vardi is an Israeli theoretical computer scientist. He is the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University, United States. and a faculty advisor for the Ken Kennedy Institute. His interests focus on applications of logic to computer science, including database theory, finite model theory, knowledge of multi-agent systems, computer-aided verification and reasoning, and teaching logic across the curriculum. He is an expert in model checking, constraint satisfaction and database theory, common knowledge (logic), and theoretical computer science.
Ronald Fagin is an American mathematician and computer scientist, and IBM Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center. He is known for his work in database theory, finite model theory, and reasoning about knowledge.
Codd's theorem states that relational algebra and the domain-independent relational calculus queries, two well-known foundational query languages for the relational model, are precisely equivalent in expressive power. That is, a database query can be formulated in one language if and only if it can be expressed in the other.
Oscar Peter Buneman is a British computer scientist who works in the areas of database systems and database theory.
Dan Suciu is a full professor of computer science at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995 under the supervision of Val Tannen. After graduation, he was a principal member of the technical staff at AT&T Labs until he joined the University of Washington in 2000. Suciu does research in data management, with an emphasis on Web data management and managing uncertain data. He is a co-author of an influential book on managing semistructured data.
David Maier is the Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technologies in the Department of Computer Science at Portland State University. Born in Eugene, OR, he has also been a computer science faculty member at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (1978–82), Oregon Graduate Center, University of Wisconsin, Oregon Health & Science University (2001–present) and National University of Singapore (2012–15). He holds a B.A. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University (1978).
Victor Vianu is a computer scientist, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of the ACM from 2009 to 2015.
Tova Milo is a full Professor of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University and the Dean of the Faculty of Exact Sciences. She served as the head of the Computer Science Department from 2011 to 2014. Milo is the head of the data management group in Tel Aviv University, and her research focuses on Web data management. She received her PhD from the Hebrew University in 1992 under the supervision of Catriel Beeri, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and INRIA, France, prior to joining Tel Aviv University.
Leonid Libkin is a computer scientist who works in data management, in particular in database theory, and in logic in computer science.
Marc Fontecave is a French chemist. An international specialist in bioinorganic chemistry, he currently teaches at the Collège de France in Paris, where he heads the Laboratory of Chemistry of Biological Processes.
Olivier Gascuel is a French researcher in bioinformatics. He is a research director at the CNRS. His work focuses in particular on phylogeny. He was the director of the Centre for Bioinformatics, Biostatistics and Integrative Biology at the Pasteur Institute from 2015 till 2020. In 2021, he joined the Institute of Systematics, Evolution, Biodiversity (ISYEB) at the National Museum of Natural History, France.
Gabriel Peyré is a French mathematician. Most of his work lies in the field of transportation theory. He is a CNRS senior researcher and a Professor in the mathematics and applications department of the École normale supérieure in Paris. He was awarded the CNRS Silver Medal in 2021.
In database theory, the query evaluation problem is the problem of determining the answers to a query on a database. Research in database theory aims at determining the computational complexity of answering different kinds of queries over databases, in particular over relational databases.
Relational transducers are a theoretical model for studying computer systems through the lens of database relations. This model extends the transducer model in formal language theory. They were first introduced in 1998 by Abiteboul et al for the study of electronic commerce applications. The computation model treats the input and output as sequences of relations. The state of the transducer is a state of a database and transitions through the state machine can be thought of as updates to the database state. The model was inspired by the design of active databases and motivated by a desire to be able to express business applications declaratively via logical formulas.
