Laura Haas
Laura Haas
Director, Computer Science
Almaden Research Center
IBM Research
Laura Haas is a Distinguished Engineer and currently the Director of Computer Science at IBM's Almaden Research Center. Previously, she was senior manager for Information Integration Solutions Architecture and Development in IBM's Software Group. Dr. Haas was one of the founders of Information Integration Solutions, which today includes products that can integrate both structured and unstructured data via federation, consolidation and search. Products include WebSphere Information Integrator (Standard, Advanced, Replication, Content, Event Publish and OmniFind Editions) and WebSphere DataStage, ProfileStage, and QualityStage. Dr. Haas formed and managed the development team in its first two years, returning to a more purely technical role in the product suite with the acquisition of Ascential Software in 2005. Before joining Information Integration, she managed the DB2 UDB Query Compiler development, including key technologies for Information Integration and the Life Sciences industry, such as Federated Database and XML Query.
Dr. Haas spent the first part of her career as a research staff member and manager at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose. Dr. Haas joined IBM in 1981 as a research staff member on the R* distributed relational database management project. She worked on the design and implementation of many aspects of the R* system, including catalog management, query processing, and distributed execution protocols. She was co-manager of the Starburst extensible database system project from its inception through November 1989. Technology from this project forms the basis of the DB2 UDB query processor. Dr. Haas then headed the Exploratory Database Systems Department at IBM Almaden for three and a half years. After a sabbatical year at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, she returned to start a new project at IBM on heterogeneous middleware systems (Garlic). Garlic technology married with DB2 UDB query processing is the basis for WebSphere Information Integrator's federation capabilities, and for the earlier DiscoveryLink offering for Life Sciences R&D. Dr. Haas served as "acting CTO" for the DiscoveryLink offering in its initial year, while managing an exploratory research project on schema mapping (Clio). She joined IBM's Software Group in March 2001. Before joining IBM, Dr. Haas studied Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at Harvard University, and Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, where she received her PhD in 1981. Her dissertation explored the problem of deadlocks in distributed systems.
Dr. Haas was vice-chair of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on the Management of Data (SIGMOD) from 1989-1997. She has served as an Associate Editor of the ACM journal Transactions on Database Systems, as Program Chair of the 1998 ACM SIGMOD technical conference and the IIS track of the 2005 VLDB conference, and is currently Vice President of the VLDB Board of Trustees. She has received an IBM Corporate Award for her work on federated database technology, IBM awards for Outstanding Technical Achievement for her work on R* and on DiscoveryLink, an IBM Outstanding Contribution award for Starburst, a YWCA Tribute to Women in INdustry (TWIN) award, and an ACM SIGMOD Outstanding Contribution Award.
