Ramez Elmasri is a professor and the associate chairperson of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington. He has over 140 refereed research publications, and has supervised 16 PhD students and over 100 MS students. His research has covered many areas of database manage- ment and big data, including conceptual modeling and data integration, query languages and indexing techniques, temporal and spatio-temporal databases, bioinformatics databases, data collection from sensor networks, and mining/analysis of spatial and spatio-temporal data. He has worked as a consultant to various companies, including Digital, Honeywell, Hewlett Packard, and Action Technologies, as well as consulting with law firms on patents. He was the Program Chair of the 1993 International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER conference) and program vice-chair of the 1994 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering. He has served on the ER conference steering committee and has been on the program committees of many conferences. He has given several tutorials at the VLDB, ICDE, and ER conferences. He also co-authored the book “Operating Systems: A Spiral Approach” (McGraw-Hill, 2009) with Gil Carrick and David Levine. Elmasri is a recipient of the UTA College of Engineering Outstanding Teaching Award in 1999. He holds a BS degree in Engineering from Alexandria University, and MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Shamkant B. Navathe is a professor and the founder of the database research group at the College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. He has worked with IBM and Siemens in their research divisions and has been a consultant to various companies including Digital, Computer Corporation of America, Hewlett Packard, Equifax, and Persistent Systems. He was the General Co-chairman of the 1996 International VLDB (Very Large DataBase) conference in Bombay, India. He was also program co-chair of ACM SIGMOD 1985 International Conference and General Co-chair of the IFIP WG 2.6 Data Semantics Workshop in 1995. He has served on the VLDB foundation and has been on the steering committees of several conferences. He has been an associate editor of a number of journals including ACM Computing Surveys, and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. He also co-authored the book “Conceptual Design: An Entity Relationship Approach” (Addison Wesley, 1992) with Carlo Batini and Stefano Ceri. Navathe is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and recipient of the IEEE Computer Science, Engineering and Education Impact award in 2015. Navathe holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and has over 150 refereed publications in journals and conferences.
