Amr
El Abbadi is currently Professor and Chair of the Computer Science
Department at University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his
B. Eng. in Computer Science from Alexandria University, Egypt, and
received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in
August 1987. He has spent extended visits to the University of Campinas in Brazil, IBM Almaden Research Center, the Swedish Institute
of Computer Science in Stockholm, Sweden and at IRISA at the
University of Rennes in France. In 2002-03, Prof. El Abbadi was
director of the University of California, Education Abroad Center at
the American University in Cairo. He has served as area editor for
Information Systems: An International Journal, an editor of
Information Processing Letters (IPL) and Associate editor of the
Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Data Engineering. He was Vice
Chair of the 1999 International Conference on Distributed Computing
Systems, Vice Chair for the International Conference on Data
Engineering 2002, group leader for the International Conference on
Management of Data (SIGMOD) 2005, and the Americas Program Chair for
the 2000 International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB). He
has also served as a board member of the VLDB Endowment from
2002--2008. In 2007, Prof. El Abbadi received the UCSB Senate
Outstanding Mentorship Award for his excellence in mentoring graduate
students. He has published over 250 articles in databases and
distributed systems.
Sunita Sarawagi researches
in
the
fields of databases, data mining, and machine learning. Her current
research interests are information integration, graphical
and structured models, and probabilistic databases. She is associate
professor at IIT
Bombay. Prior to that she was a research staff member at IBM Almaden
Research Center. She got her PhD in databases from the University of
California at Berkeley and a bachelors degree from IIT Kharagpur. She
has several publications in databases and data mining and several
patents. She serves on the board of directors of ACM SIGKDD and VLDB
foundation. She was program chair for the ACM SIGKDD 2008 conference
and has served as program committee member for SIGMOD, VLDB, SIGKDD,
ICDE, and ICML conferences. She is on the editorial board of the ACM
TODS, ACM TKDD, and FnT for machine learning journals.
