S. Sudarshan is currently the Subrao M. Nilekani Chair Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin in 1992, and he was a member of the technical staff at Bell Labs before joining IIT Bombay. Sudarshan is a fellow of the ACM. His research spans several areas of database systems, with a focus on query processing and query optimization. His paper on keyword search in databases published in 2002 won the IEEE ICDEMost Influential Paper Award in 2012, and his work on main-memory databases received the Bell Laboratories President’s Award in 1999. His current research areas include testing and grading of SQL queries, optimization of database applications by rewriting of imperative code, and query optimization for parallel databases. He has published over 100 papers and obtained 15 patents.

Henry F. (Hank) Korth is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and co-director of the Computer Science and Business program at Lehigh University. Prior to joining Lehigh, he was director of Database Principles Research at Bell Labs, a vice president of Panasonic Technologies, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and a research staff member at IBM Research. Korth is a fellow of the ACM and of the IEEE and a winner of the 10-Year Award at the VLDB Conference. His numerous research publications span a wide range of aspects of database systems, including transaction management in parallel and distributed systems, real-time systems, query processing, and the influence on these areas from modern computing architectures. Most recently, his research has addressed issues in the application of blockchains in enterprise databases.