Wenfei Fan wins Roger Needham Award 2008 and Yangtze River Scholar Award

The Roger Needham award is awarded by the British Computer Society for distinguished research contribution in computer science by a UK based researcher within ten years of their PhD.

Video of Roger Needham lecture

The Yangtze River Scholar Award (also known as the Chang Jiang Scholar Award), is awarded by the Ministry of Education of China. It is considered one of the most prestigious academic awards given by the People's Republic of China.

Professor Wenfei Fan is, simply put, one of the top all-around database researchers in his generation. He has made substantial contributions both to the theory and to the practice of a subject.

Wenfei’s PhD work opened up a new field of constraints for semi-structured data, which eventually led to the study of constraints for XML, now a mature area well-represented in the full spectrum of database research, from theory to practice to standards. The continuation of this work, which started when Wenfei was at Bell Labs and continued after his arrival to Edinburgh, has now embraced XML and its various schema formalisms, and has broadened to the static analysis of XML query languages. It has resulted in a succession of theoretical papers of outstanding quality and has also influenced the design of XML schema.

The general goal of Wenfei’s work has been to bring the efficiency and functionality of databases to bear on data on the web.

In the past few years his research has resulted in several practical developments:

• A system for efficiently mapping relational databases into an XML documents with a specified type using a generalization of attribute grammars and a new theory of tree transducers. This is currently in use for generating exportable scientific data sets.
• A system for imposing secure views of an XML document based on the DTD of that document.
• The use of partial evaluation (borrowed from functional programming) for the efficient evaluation of boolean queries on distributed data.
• A method of data cleaning based on conditional functional dependencies, which Wenfei proposed for this purpose. This is a nice application of his early ideas on constraints in databases to the highly practical problem of data cleaning (unclean data is estimated to cost US companies alone more than billions of dollars a year).

Wenfei is part of the Database Group at the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science.

Edinburgh is proud to claim 3 out of the the 5 Roger Needham Awards so far. In addition to Wenfei, Professor Jane Hillston was awarded the prize in 2004 (she was the first researcher in the UK to win this prize) and in 2006 the prize went to Edinburgh graduate, Andrew Fitzgibbon.