Serge Joseph Abiteboul (born 25 August 1953 in
Paris
Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. Si ...
, France)
is a French
computer scientist working in the areas of
data management,
database theory, and
finite model theory.
Education
The son of two hardware store owners, Abiteboul attended high-school in
Romorantin, and
Higher School Preparatory Classes in
Tours
Tours ( , ) is one of the largest cities in the region of Centre-Val de Loire, France. It is the prefecture of the department of Indre-et-Loire. The commune of Tours had 136,463 inhabitants as of 2018 while the population of the whole metro ...
. He was admitted to the
Télécom Paris engineering school and studied at the
Technion in Haifa for a year.
Abiteboul received his
PhD PHD or PhD may refer to:
* Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification
Entertainment
* '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series
* '' Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic
* Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group
** Ph.D. (Ph.D. al ...
from the
University of Southern California under the supervision of
Seymour Ginsburg, in 1982.
Career and research
Abiteboul is a senior researcher at the
Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique (INRIA), the French national research institute focussing on
computer science
Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...
and related areas, and has been a professor of the
Collège de France.
He is known for his many contributions in the areas of
finite model theory, database theory, and database systems. In finite model theory, the Abiteboul–Vianu Theorem states that
polynomial time is equal to
PSPACE if and only if
fixed point logic is the same as partial fixed point logic. In database theory, he has contributed a wide variety of results, the most recent on languages for the distributed processing of XML data. In data management, he is best known for his early work on semistructured and Web databases. In 2008, according to
Citeseer, he is the most highly cited researcher in the data management area who works at a European institution.
Abiteboul is also known for two books, one on database theory and one on Web data management.
He frequently writes for French newspapers, including Le Monde, Libération
and La Tribune
A member of the
ARCEP, the independent agency in charge of regulating telecommunications in France, Abiteboul has been an advocate of net neutrality.
He has also been critical of virtual assistants and their impact on privacy.
In 2019, he is among the members of a group tasked by the French government with addressing online bullying and harassment.
Awards and honours
Abiteboul was awarded the
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
SIGMOD Test of Time Award in 2004,
the Prix EADS in 2007
and the ACM PODS Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award (2008). Abiteboul was elected a member of the
French Academy of Sciences in 2008,
of the European Academy of Sciences in 2011, and an
ACM Fellow in 2011.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Abiteboul, Serge
Database researchers
Members of the French Academy of Sciences
Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
Living people
1953 births
French computer scientists