Chair of Foundations of Data Management

We are pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Leonid Libkin to the newly-established Chair of Foundations of Data Management at Edinburgh, and congratulate him on a Marie-Curie Chair award from the EU.

Leonid Libkin received his BSc (1986) and MSc (1988) in Moscow, Russia. While there, he worked primarily in lattice theory and universal algebra. He also became interested in database theory. He moved to the U.S.A. to pursue a PhD (1994) in Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania, supported by an AT&T PhD Fellowship. He worked on query languages for collection types and incomplete information in databases.

Libkin then joined the Computing Sciences Research Center of Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill. Since that time, his primary research interests have been in the areas of databases and applications of logic in computer science.

While at Bell Labs, his solution to one of the most challenging open problems in database theory (Kanellakis' conjecture) led to a series of papers that developed the theory of constraint databases. He also found a unified framework for treating locality of logics, and applied it to studying real-life query languages such as SQL. Among his other projects at Bell Labs were transaction safety, and view and integrity maintenance in databases.

In 2000, Libkin joined the University of Toronto, where he started working on various aspects of XML, and on connections between logic and automata. He produced papers on XML constraints, design of XML schemas, and automatic structures.

Professor Libkin has written/edited 4 books, 10 book chapters, and over 100 papers published in top computer science journals and conference proceedings. He also has three patents.

Professor Libkin will take up his Chair in July 2006. Within the School of Informatics, he will join the Database group in the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science.