Patricia Selinger facts for kids

Selinger in 2014

Patricia G. Selinger is an American computer scientist and an important expert at IBM. She is famous for her work on relational database management systems, which are special computer programs that help organize and find information.

Early Life and Education

Patricia Selinger studied applied mathematics at Harvard University. She earned her first degree in 1971, a master's degree in 1972, and her Ph.D. (doctorate) in 1975.

Building Better Databases

Dr. Selinger played a very important part in creating something called System R. This was a groundbreaking computer program that helped develop how we use databases today. Think of a database as a super-organized digital filing cabinet for information.

She also wrote a famous paper about how computers can find information in a database in the fastest and best way possible. This is called "query optimization." Imagine you ask a database a question (a "query"). Dr. Selinger helped figure out how the computer could quickly find the answer without wasting time. Her ideas are still used in most modern database systems!

She was a key member of the original System R team. This team created the very first research version of a relational database. She also started and led IBM's Database Technology Institute. This group was very successful at taking new ideas from research and turning them into real products.

Dr. Selinger made many important contributions to how databases work. This includes making databases faster, handling lots of data at once (data parallelism), working with data spread across different computers (distributed data), and managing information that isn't neatly organized (unstructured data). Before she retired from IBM, she was a Vice President, helping to guide IBM's data technology.

Awards and Recognition

Because of her amazing work, Dr. Selinger received many high honors:

• In 1994, she was named an IBM Fellow. This is the highest technical award at IBM.
• In 2009, she became an ACM Fellow. The ACM is a major group for computer professionals.
• She is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
• In 1999, she was chosen to be a member of the National Academy of Engineering. This was for her leadership and contributions to database technology.

Dr. Selinger has written more than 40 papers about her work. She also received the ACM Systems Software Award for her contributions to System R. In 2002, she received the SIGMOD Innovations Award, which is the top award in the field of data management.

Later Career

From 2014 to 2016, Dr. Selinger was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at a company called Paradata. Here, she worked on tough problems like making different types of data work together, organizing data, tracking where data comes from, and linking related information. This helped make supply chains more transparent.

From 2017 to 2018, Dr. Selinger worked as a Principal Architect at Salesforce.com. She is now retired.

See also

In Spanish: Patricia Selinger para niños