Dr. M. Tamer Özsu (pictured above with Greg Washington, Interim Dean) was named a Distinguished Alumnus by the Ohio State College of Engineering. This is one of the highest honors an alumnus may receive from the College. The "Distinguished Alumnus" Awards were established in 1954. Their purpose is to recognize distinguished achievement in one's profession by reason of significant inventions, important research or design, administrative leadership, or genius in production.
Dr. Özsu is currently a professor of Computer Science and Director of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, and holds a University Research Chair at Waterloo which he joined in 2000 as a Faculty Research Fellowship. Prior to this position, he occupied a McCalla Research Professorship from 1993-1994 at the University of Alberta where he was a faculty member between 1984 and 2000. Tamer, as he is informally known, is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a member of Sigma Xi. He was awarded the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award in 2006.
He earned a Master of Science degree from The Ohio State University in 1981 and his PhD in 1983 in computer and information science and bachelor and Master of Science degrees in industrial engineering (1974 and 1978) from the Middle East Technical University.
Özsu's current research focuses on Internet-scale data distribution that emphasizes stream data management, peer-to-peer databases and Web data management; multimedia data management, concentrating on similarity-based retrieval of time series and trajectory data; and the integration of database and information retrieval technologies, focusing on XML query processing and optimization.
Recently Dr. Özsu visited CSE and gave a talk. The abstract may be found here.