Peter Buneman | |
|---|---|
| Born | Oscar Peter Buneman 1943 (age 81–82) |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge[5] University of Warwick |
| Known for |
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| Awards | |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer Science |
| Institutions | |
| Thesis | Models of Learning and Memory (1970) |
| Doctoral advisor | Christopher Zeeman[4] |
| Doctoral students | |
| Website | homepages |
Oscar Peter Buneman (born 1943) is a British computer scientist who works in the areas ofdatabase systems anddatabase theory.[10][11][12][13][14][15][16]
Buneman was educated at theUniversity of Cambridge, where he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts while studying theCambridge Mathematical Tripos fromGonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Buneman went on to study at theUniversity of Warwick, where he received his PhD in 1970.[4]
Following his PhD, Buneman worked briefly at the University of Edinburgh, followed by a professorship of computer science at theUniversity of Pennsylvania, which he held for several decades. In 2002, he moved to theUniversity of Edinburgh, where he built up the database research group. He is one of the founders and the Associate Director of Research of the UKDigital Curation Centre,[3] which is located inEdinburgh.
Buneman is known for his research in database systems and database theory, in particular for establishing connections betweendatabases andprogramming language theory,[17] such as introducingmonad-basedquery languages for nestedrelations and complex object databases.[18]He also pioneered research on managingsemi-structured data,[19][20] and, recently, research on dataprovenance, annotations, and digital curation.
Incomputational biology, he is known for his work on reconstructingphylogenetic trees[21] based onBuneman graphs, which are named in his honour.
Buneman is aFellow of the Royal Society, fellow of theACM, a fellow of theRoyal Society of Edinburgh, and has won aRoyal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.He has chaired both flagship research conferences indata management,SIGMOD (in 1993) andVLDB (in 2008), as well as the main database theory conference,PODS (in 2001).
Buneman was appointedMember of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2013 New Year Honours for services to data systems and computing.[22] His nomination for theRoyal Society reads
Peter Buneman is distinguished for his advances in uniting programming languages and databases. On the theoretical side this has involved new results in types, monads and structural recursion including (with his student Ohori) type inference for record types, and (with Tannen et al) results that demonstrated a tight connection between monad-based languages and those based on the predicate calculus. On the application side, he used these techniques to demonstrate that – contrary to an assertion by the US Department of Energy – queries on existing non-relational genomic databases could be directly evaluated; fruitful collaboration with biologists ensued.
This research carries over into his recent study of the principles of semistructured or "web-like" data. He is a leading proponent of this new field, and co-author of the first text book in it. Another recent concern is with the provenance of data on the Web, where data is continually copied and transformed. Already, with Khanna et al. he has built an efficient archiving system for scientific databases; more fundamentally, he seeks a formal basis for tracing provenance.
In addition to his work in databases, Buneman's early work on mathematical phylogeny underlies most modern phylogenetic reconstruction techniques.[1]
Buneman is the son of physicistOscar Buneman.
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