Wenfei Fan facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Wenfei Fan
FRS FREng FRSE MAE
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| 樊文飞 | |
Fan in 2018
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| Alma mater | Peking University (BS, MS) University of Pennsylvania (PhD) |
| Awards | Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2018) ACM Fellow (2012) Roger Needham Award (2008) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Databases |
| Institutions | University of Edinburgh Beihang University |
| Thesis | Path Constraints for Databases with or without Schemas (1999) |
| Doctoral advisor | Peter Buneman Scott Weinstein |
Wenfei Fan (Chinese: 樊文飞; pinyin: Fán Wénfēi) is a Chinese-British computer scientist. He is a professor at the University of Edinburgh. He studies how to manage and understand large amounts of information, especially on the internet.
Learning and Degrees
Wenfei Fan studied at Peking University in China. There, he earned his first two degrees. Later, he went to the University of Pennsylvania in the USA. In 1999, he earned his PhD in Computer Science. His research was guided by Peter Buneman and Scott Weinstein.
Work and Discoveries
After finishing his PhD in 1999, Wenfei Fan stayed in the USA for a few years. In 2004, he moved to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He became a professor there in 2006. His job title is Professor of Web Data Management.
Professor Fan has made very important discoveries in how we handle information. He works with data management, which is about organizing and using data. He has found new ways to ask questions about very large sets of information, called big data. He also created new methods that help regular computer systems work better with huge amounts of data.
His work has been used by phone companies. They use his ideas to look at massive amounts of customer data. This data was too big for their old systems. Professor Fan also helped improve data quality. This means making sure information is correct and useful. He invented new ways to "clean" data, which means fixing mistakes. Many businesses now use his data cleaning methods. He also helped us understand semi-structured data. This is data that isn't perfectly organized, like information on websites.
Awards and Special Recognitions
Professor Fan has received many awards for his important work. These awards show that he is a leading expert in his field. Being a "Fellow" of a society means he is recognized as a top scientist or engineer.
- He became a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) in 2023.
- In 2019, he became a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
- He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2018.
- He received the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2018.
- His work won the SIGMOD Research Highlight Award in 2018.
- He also won the Best Paper Award for SIGMOD in 2017.
- The VLDB conference gave him the Best Demo Award in 2017.
- He received an Advanced Fellowship from the European Research Council (ERC) in 2015.
- He won the Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award for ACM PODS in 2015.
- He became an ACM Fellow in 2012.
- He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) in 2011.
- He was named a National Professor of the Thousand-Talent Program in China in 2010.
- He won the Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award for ACM PODS again in 2010.
- His paper won the Best Paper Award at the VLDB conference in 2010.
- He received The Roger Needham Award in the UK in 2008.
- He won the Best Paper Award for ICDE in 2007.
- He was named a Changjiang Scholar in China in 2007.
- He received the Best Paper of the Year Award for Computer Networks in 2002.
- He won The Career Award in the USA in 2001.
