| Jeffrey D. Ullman | |
|---|---|
| Born | November 22, 1942 |
| Citizenship | American |
| Nationality | American |
| Institutions | Stanford University |
| Alma mater | Columbia University, Princeton University |
| Doctoral advisor | Arthur Bernstein, Archie McKellar |
| Doctoral students |
Surajit Chaudhuri, Kevin Karplus, David Maier, Harry Mairson, Alberto O. Mendelzon, Jeffrey F. Naughton, Anand Rajaraman, Yehoshua Sagiv, Mihalis Yannakakis |
| Known for | database theory, database systems, formal language theory |
| Notable awards | Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (1994), ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award (1996), ACM SIGMOD Best Paper Award (1996), Karl V. Karlstrom outstanding educator award (1998), Knuth Prize (2000), ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award (2006), ACM SIGMOD Test of Time Award (2006), IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2010) |
Jeffrey David Ullman (born November 22, 1942) is a renowned computer scientist. His textbooks on compilers (various editions are popularly known as the Dragon Book), theory of computation (also known as the Cinderella book), data structures, and databases are regarded as standards in their fields.
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Ullman received a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering Mathematics from Columbia University in 1963 and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 1966. He then worked for several years at Bell Labs. From 1969 to 1979 he was a professor at Princeton. Since 1979 he has been a professor at Stanford University, where he is currently the Stanford W. Ascherman Professor of Computer Science (Emeritus). In 1995 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and in 2000 he was awarded the Knuth Prize. Ullman is also the co-recipient (with John Hopcroft) of the 2010 IEEE John von Neumann Medal, “For laying the foundations for the fields of automata and language theory and many seminal contributions to theoretical computer science.”[1]
Ullman's research interests include database theory, data integration, data mining, and education using the information infrastructure. He is one of the founders of the field of database theory, and was the doctoral advisor of an entire generation of students who later became leading database theorists in their own right. He was the Ph.D. advisor of Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google, and served on Google's technical advisory board. He is currently the CEO of Gradiance. In 2011, Ullman has come under fire for making allegedly discriminatory, anti-Iranian remarks through email correspondence and web postings, as was the opinion of the bullying group NIAC (National Iranian American Council).
In one email to an Iranian graduate student, the professor responded to an inquiry about admission to his department saying, "Even if I were in a position to help, I will not help Iranian students until Iran recognizes and respects Israel as the land of the Jewish people." The professor went on to write, "If Iranians want the benefits of Stanford and other institutions in the US, they have to respect the values we hold in the US."
The professor's courageous public Stanford website includes a page entitled "Answers to All Questions Iranian," in which he expresses his political views on questions such as why the US shot down an Iranian airliner in the 1988 or why the CIA deposed Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. The page, written as a series of questions from Iranians with answers from the professor that he receives repeatedly via email, also includes the question, "Can I get into Stanford?" with the honest response, "Probably not. At least I can't help you. Admissions for undergraduates are not handled by faculty at Stanford or any US school. For graduate work, a committee of faculty and students selects admittees. The process is honest and fair; no faculty member can or would influence the process."
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