Val Tannen is a computer scientist known for his contributions to the fields of database systems and programming languages. He is currently professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

Biography

Tannen was born in Romania and received his undergraduate degree from the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest. After emigrating to the US, he received his PhD from

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

under the supervision of Albert Meyer. He has held numerous international visiting positions.

Contributions

Tannen has contributed to the principles of both programming languages and databases and also to the unification of the two subjects. One of Tannen’s major contributions is the use of structural recursion to define a query language for nested relations. This not only provided a basis for query optimization on nested relations, it became – through the use of comprehensions – a standard technique for embedding relational databases in programming languages. Another is the invention of provenance semirings which give a generalization of many adjuncts to relational databases, such as

probabilistic databases Probability is a branch of mathematics and statistics concerning events and numerical descriptions of how likely they are to occur. The probability of an event is a number between 0 and 1; the larger the probability, the more likely an ev ...

, C-tables and bag semantics as well as providing a general formalism for data provenance. In addition to databases and programming languages, Tannen has contributed to bioinformatics and to systematic and evolutionary biology. On May 24 and 25 2024 a festschrift was held in Val Tannen's honor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Awards and honors

* 2023 Foreign member of

Academia Europaea The Academia Europaea is a pan-European Academy of humanities, letters, law, and sciences. The Academia was founded in 1988 as a functioning Europe-wide Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly inquiry. It acts as co-ordinator of Europe ...

* 2017 10 years Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award from the

Symposium on Principles of Database Systems The ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS) is an international research conference on database theory, and has been held yearly since 1982. It is sponsored by three Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Com ...

* 2013 Fellow 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 ...

* 2014 20 years Test-of-Time Award from the Intl. Conf. on Database Theory{{cite web , url=https://databasetheory.org/ICDT/test-of-time , title =ICDT Test-of-Time Awards , access-date=9 April 2024 * 1990 - 1995 Presidential Young Investigator from the US National Science Foundation

References

1953 births Politehnica University of Bucharest alumni Living people Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Academia Europaea University of Pennsylvania people University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science faculty