IBM researcher Phokion Kolaitis was recently elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancements of Science (AAAS) - an esteemed honor in which the organization's council elects those whose "efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications are scientifically or socially distinguished." Dr. Kolaitis, recognized for his "distinguished contributions to logic in computer science and to the principles of database systems", always had a knack for math and logic. I spent some time with him to talk about this accomplishment, fueled mostly by, as he puts, "The drive for knowledge. I always had this curiosity and passion for advancing the frontier of knowledge."
And passion was a common theme in the discussion of Phokion's academic and career achievements. By high school, the Greece native had already decided he wanted to pursue mathematics. Once he entered University of Athens as an undergraduate, he felt science was what interested him, but that mathematics was the underlying basis for all things scientific. As he excelled in the university, he found himself focusing on the foundations of mathematics and, in particular, on mathematical logic. After completing his Ph.D. in Mathematics from UCLA, his interests evolved to applications of logic to computer science with particular emphasis on the connections between logic and databases. He became a professor of computer science at UC Santa Cruz and later on spent four years at Almaden as a research staff member and senior manager of the department of computer science principles and methodologies, also known as the "theory group."
"One of the reasons I wanted to come to IBM from academia was because I wanted to work on the foundations of information integration," explained Phokion, "in an area called schema mappings and data exchange." This area of study focuses on trying to develop methods and tools for restructuring data organized under one format into data organized into another. "It's a very old but recurrent problem in databases. With other colleagues at Almaden, we developed a framework for studying this problem that, in turn, facilitated the development of tools to ease the challenges." This work was recognized by IBM Research as an outstanding accomplishment, while at the same time some of the papers published on this topic have received hundreds of citations.
Outside of his career, Phokion has an uncommon hobby:
collecting fountain pens. His collection features about 250 pens, mostly vintage pens from the United States, Germany, and the UK, but also modern pens from France, Italy, and Japan. His favorite and most precious pen is his father's - a Parker '51 with a rare broad nib.
Phokion keeps a close relationship with his children, both of whom are pursuing medical careers - his daughter Irini is currently a first-year pediatric resident at the Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago after earning her MD at Georgetown University and his son Nicholas is a third year medical student at UC San Diego. Phokion is a fan of classical music and enjoys Greek poetry, citing his favorite poet as George Seferis, the winner of the Nobel 1963 Nobel Prize for Literature. Seferis captivated Phokion - as he says "Seferis' speech at the Nobel Banquet encapsulates my own feelings about the Greek language, poetry and the human condition."Phokion will be presented the AAAS Fellow award during a recognition dinner in Washington, D.C. on February 19, 2011.
