Prof. Donald Kossmann honoured as ACM Fellow

In 1993, the Council of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) established the ACM Fellow Program to recognize and honor its members for their achievements in computing and computer science that have provided fundamental knowledge to the field and generated multiple innovations in industry, commerce, entertainment and education. On June 4 this year, the organization ceremoniously celebrated further 41 of its members at its Annual Awards Banquet in San Jose, CA. "These men and women have made advances in technology and contributions to the computing community that are meeting the dynamic demands of the 21st century. Their ability to think critically and solve problems creatively is enabling great advances on an international scale," said ACM President Alain Chesnais. After many festivities and back in Zurich, I used the first chance to talk to Donald Kossmann.

Donald, you have just been honored as ACM Fellow. Undoubtedly, some people do project a certain wisdom onto you. What do you think the award should stand for besides, obviously, research excellence?
Well, first and foremost it is an award for research excellence. The award is given to researchers and practitioners who have made some break-through developments in modern information technology. Second, this award is given by the ACM, the world-wide biggest organization for IT researchers and practitioners. ACM expects their fellows to be role models who provide guidance to other IT researchers and practitioners. Honestly, I do not yet know what this expectation means. So far, I thought of my self as a rather junior member of the IT community who was – and still is – looking for guidance himself.

Your nomination and win make our department sparkle, too, and shine that little bit extra. So, curiously, what was it specifically in your research work that impressed the judges (politically incorrect answers preferred)?
In my particular case, I was given the award for "contributions on XML and distributed information systems". That sounds cryptic, but it is actually quite easy to explain: "XML" symbolizes any kind of data such as text, pictures, e-mail, etc. Traditionally, databases only work for specific kinds of data with a highly regular structure, e.g. bank accounts always have the name of the owner and the balance. "Distributed information systems" stands for "the cloud". Traditional databases operate on a single server and the step to the cloud allows to manage data on a large number – possibly thousands – of machines. Steve Jobs stated in his recent keynote when introducing Apple's iCloud: "It should just work". That is, users should not worry about all these technologies and should just be able to manage their music, e-mail, etc. on all their devices without thinking about XML and the cloud and all these technical terms. It seems that my research has helped a bit to implement this vision.

The International Monetary Fund was seeking for a new leader. The financial crisis – a not-yet-ending story. And amid all these global challenges: Sony's big security lapse and Amazon’s cloud-computing outage. It seems that currently the unified theory – everything in the world can get worse – comes true. If you actively contributed towards finding a future-oriented solution to global issues, what would be your own bold ideas be?
When I was a student in Germany, one of my professors said that a good IT professional creates jobs for two additional IT professionals. I think that this observation generalizes: A good computer scientist creates twice as many problems as he or she solves. We are still in the pioneering days of computing and we are still at the beginning of defining the problems that can be solved by computer science. Except for the leadership issue of the IMF, I believe that all the crises that you listed involve a great deal of IT. You may want to add the climate crises and Fukushima to your list; protecting nuclear power plants against earthquakes and Tsunamis involves simulations with an extra-ordinary amount of computing. What we are trying to do in our research is to make this computing affordable, especially if it involves a huge amount of data. While things can always get worse, I would like to point out that I strongly believe that the world has become and is still becoming a better place and that computing, in general, and data management technology (my field), in particular, has contributed to this trend. Or would you like to go back to the 1990s or even earlier? Would that be more fun than living today? Probably not. I believe that the reason why we are having these big crises is that we have highly optimized all our socio-economic and ecologic systems. As a result, it has global scale and huge impact if something goes wrong, resulting in these "giga-crises". Our role as scientists is to better understand all these systems and to simplify them. In particular, my role as Computer Scientist is to simplify and better understand IT systems that are at the heart of all other systems. At the same time, however, we need to continue to optimize and improve the efficiency of IT systems.

All happiness is momentary, as the poets like to point out. After this honor how do you make being a researcher does not sound like any other job?
I truly hope that this award is not the pendant of an "Oscar for life-time achievements". These Oscars are typically given to retired actors and directors. My hope is that I can and will continue as if nothing has happened. Of course, I will continue to do basic research on data management and the cloud. Furthermore, I would like to see the results of this research hit the light of day. In 2006, I co-founded a company – called 28msec – that builds a platform for developing data-intensive applications in the cloud. More recently, I am trying to help students to start a company, Teralytics, to carry out large-scale business intelligence in the cloud. One of the great privileges of being a professor at ETH is the freedom to look at technology from many different perspectives and to follow technology from the initial ideas until product development. Other than that, however, it is just like any other job.