Biographical Sketch

Laks V.S. Lakshmanan obtained his Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics and Communications from the A.C. College of Engineering and Technology, Karaikudi, India, and his Master of Engineering and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Science , Bangalore, India. He was awarded the Witold Lipski Memorial Best Student Paper Prize at the International Conference on Database Theory, Rome, Italy, September 1986, and the Gold Medal for the Best Doctoral Dissertation in Electrical Science Division at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (1990). He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Computer Science and Computer Systems Research Institute, at the University of Toronto, Toronto, Ont. during 1987-89.

His research interests span a wide spectrum of topics in Database Systems and related areas, including: relational and object-oriented databases, advanced data models for novel applications, OLAP and data warehousing, database mining, data integration, semi-structured data and XML, directory-enabled networks, querying the WWW, information and social networks and social media, recommender systems, and personalization. A common theme underlying his research is to model problems not traditionally viewed as standard data management problems and bring the technology of efficient data management and mining to bear on them, thus pushing the frontiers of technology. This has often taken him to the "flip" side of many fields and problems. He collaborates widely with both industry and academia the world over. He has been a consultant to H.P. Labs, Palo Alto, CA, and AT\&T Labs Research, Florham Park, NJ, Oracle Corp., and Yahoo! Research and a visiting professor or researcher at the Limburg Universitair Centrum, Limburg, Belgium, IASI, CNR, Rome, Italy, and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. His research is funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Network of Centres of Excellence/Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems (NCE/IRIS), and Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems (MITACS), and an NSERC strategic grant on Business Intelligence. He is a Research Fellow of the BC Advanced Systems Institute and was named ACM Distinguished Scientist in November 2016.

Laks has served either as Vice Chair of, or on the program committees of numerous conferences including Int. Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT), Int. Workshop on Database Programming Languages (DBPL), ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS), Int. Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER), Int. Conference on Deductive and Object-Oriented Databases (DOOD), ACM SIGMOD Conference (SIGMOD), ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD), World Wide Web Conference (WWW), Very Large Databases (VLDB), Int. Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), Int. Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), ACM Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), and Proceedings of the VLDB (PVLDB). He was a General Co-chair of SIGMOD 2008. He served on the Grant Selection Committee of NSERC (2005-2007), He has served as a reviewer for NSERC and NSF proposals and many journals including ACM Trans. on Database Systems (TODS), Jl. of Logic Programming (JLP), Jl. of Symbolic Logic (JSL), Jl. of Computer and System Sciences (JCSS), Acta Informatica, and Studia Logica. He has been a guest editor or co-editor of Journal of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, and Theoretical Computer Science. He was an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering , during 1999-2003. He has been an Associated Editor of the VLDB Journal (VLDBJ) since September 2011, an Associate Editor of the Information Systems Journal since 2015, and an Associate Editor of Distributed and Parallel Databases since 2016. His publications appear in the usual top conferences and journals in data management and mining.

Prior to joining UBC, he was a visiting professor at the K.R. School of Information Technology, IIT - Bombay during 1999--2001, before which he was an associate professor of Computer Science at Concordia University, Montreal.