Dr. C. Mohan Shares Insights on Data Landscape in a Distinguished Lecture

23 Nov 2022
Dr. C. Mohan delivers Distinguished Lecture on “The Data Landscape: Trends and Directions”.
Professor Jiming Liu, Dean of Science (left) presents a souvenir to Dr. C. Mohan.
Participants are enthusiastic about the topic and exchange their thoughts during the Q&A session.


Dr. C. Mohan from Tsinghua University, China, visited the HKBU campus and delivered a Distinguished Lecture on “The Data Landscape: Trends and Directions” on 22 November 2022, being the first guest speaker physically showed up in the event series and interacted with faculty members and students since the COVID pandemic broke out in early 2020.

In the lecture, Dr. Mohan, who worked on various database management topics in Silicon Valley – the birthplace of the relational model and SQL language – for over four decades, provided a broad overview of the evolution of the data landscape and reviewed the trends of database management in the commercial and standards areas. He also presented some market share numbers from data analysts, sharing his insights into the data landscape.

His sharing was not only of value to technical people in the research and product spaces but to management and administration people who are responsible for data-related topics. After the Lecture, Dr. Mohan also spent time mingling with faculty members and attendees, catching up and exchanging ideas with each other.

Retired from his role as an IBM Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center two years ago, Dr. Mohan is currently a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University and a Visiting Researcher at Google. Being an IBM researcher for 38.5 years, Dr. Mohan is the primary inventor of the well-known ARIES family of database recovery and concurrency control methods, as well as the industry-standard Presumed Abort commit protocol. He also worked on database, blockchain, AI and related areas, making tremendous impact on numerous IBM and non-IBM products, the research and academic communities, and standards.

In 1996, Dr. Mohan received the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award in recognition of his innovative contributions to the development and use of database systems. In 2009, Dr. Mohan was elected to the United States National Academy of Engineering. Being an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow, Dr. Mohan has served on the advisory board of IEEE Spectrum and on numerous conference and journal boards.

Video

More Photos