Héctor García-Molina (15 November 1954-25 November 2019) was a
Mexican-American
Mexican Americans ( es, mexicano-estadounidenses, , or ) are Americans of full or partial Mexican heritage. In 2019, Mexican Americans comprised 11.3% of the US population and 61.5% of all Hispanic and Latino Americans. In 2019, 71% of Mexica ...
computer scientist
A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science.
Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (a ...
and Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at
Stanford University. He was advisor to
Sergey Brin, the founder of
Google, from 1993 to 1997 when he was a computer science student at Stanford.
Biography
Born in
Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico
Monterrey ( , ) is the capital and largest city of the northeastern state of Nuevo León, Mexico, and the third largest city in Mexico behind Guadalajara and Mexico City. Located at the foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental, the city is anchor ...
, García-Molina graduated in 1974 with a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the
Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Studies (ITESM) and received both a master's degree in Electrical Engineering (1975) and a doctorate in Computer Science (1979) from
Stanford University.
From 1979 to 1991, García-Molina worked as a professor of the Computer Science Department at
Princeton University in
New Jersey. In 1992 he joined the faculty of
Stanford University as the Leonard Bosack and Sandra Lerner Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and has served as Director of the Computer Systems Laboratory (August 1994 – December 1997) and as chairman of the Computer Science Department from (January 2001 – December 2004).
During 1994–1998, he was the Principal Investigator for the Stanford Digital Library Project, the project from which the
Google search engine emerged.
García-Molina has served at the
U.S. President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) from 1997 to 2001 and has been a member of
Oracle Corporation's Board of Directors since October 2001.
García-Molina was also a Fellow member of the
Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...
, the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...
and a member of the
National Academy of Engineering. He was a Venture Advisor for Diamondhead Ventures and ONSET Ventures. In 1999 he was laureated with the
ACM SIGMOD
SIGMOD is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Management of Data, which specializes in large-scale data management problems and databases.
The annual ACM SIGMOD Conference, which began in 1975, is considered one of ...
Innovations Award.
[
]
García-Molina died of cancer on the eve of his 66th birthday.
Awards
* (2010)
VLDB 10-year Best Paper Award
[
] for the paper entitled "The Evolution of the Web and Implications for an Incremental Crawler"
in VLDB 2000.
* (2009) SIGMOD Best Demo Award
[
] for the demo entitled "CourseRank: A Social System for Course Planning".
* (2007) ICDE Influential Paper Award
[
] for the paper entitled "Disk Striping"
in ICDE 1986. Citation: This early paper on disk striping significantly influenced subsequent work on
RAID
Raid, RAID or Raids may refer to:
Attack
* Raid (military), a sudden attack behind the enemy's lines without the intention of holding ground
* Corporate raid, a type of hostile takeover in business
* Panty raid, a prankish raid by male college ...
storage.
* (2007) Honorary doctorate from
ETH Zurich. Citation: For his outstanding work in computer science.
[
]
References
External links
Héctor García-Molina's Personal Web page at Stanford University(in Spanish)
→ On the Origins of GoogleVideolecture on Web Information Management: Past, Present and Future"Excelling Beyond the Spreadsheet" Presentation at the 2008 Yahoo! Research Big Thinkers Series
{{DEFAULTSORT:Garcia-Molina, Hector
1954 births
2019 deaths
People from Monterrey
Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education alumni
Stanford University School of Engineering alumni
Mexican computer scientists
Mexican emigrants to the United States
American computer scientists
Stanford University Department of Electrical Engineering faculty
Stanford University School of Engineering faculty
Princeton University faculty
Oracle employees
Database researchers
Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering
Google people