Peter Buneman

Infobox_Scientist
name = Peter Buneman


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residence = Edinburgh, United Kingdom
citizenship = British
nationality = British
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field = Computer Science
work_institution = University of Edinburgh
alma_mater = University of Cambridge
University of Warwick
doctoral_advisor = Erik Christopher Zeeman
doctoral_students = Hassan Aït Kaci, Wenfei Fan, Leonid Libkin, Rishiyur Nikhil, Atsushi Ohori, Limsoon Wong
known_for = Buneman graphs,
query languages for nested relations,
data provenance
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prizes = Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2002),
nowrap|Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2004),
nowrap|Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery [ACM fellowship citation: http://fellows.acm.org/fellow_citation.cfm?id=1669316&srt=all]
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Oscar Peter Buneman is a British computer scientist who works in the areas of database systems and database theory.

Buneman received his PhD in mathematics from the University of Warwick, in 1970. After that he worked briefly at the University of Edinburgh, followed by a professorship of computer science at the University of Pennsylvania, which we held for several decades. In 2002, he moved to the University of Edinburgh, where he built up the database research group.He is one of the founders and the Associate Director of Research of the UK Digital Curation Centre, which is located in Edinburgh.

He is known for his research in database systems and database theory, in particular for establishing connections between databases and programming language theory [Peter Buneman, Susan B. Davidson, Gerd G. Hillebrand, and Dan Suciu: A Query Language and Optimization Techniques for Unstructured Data. SIGMOD Conference 1996: 505-516.] and introduced monad-based query languages for nested relations and complex object databases [Peter Buneman, Shamim A. Naqvi, Val Tannen, Limsoon Wong: Principles of Programming with Complex Objects and Collection Types. Theor. Comput. Sci. 149(1): 3-48 (1995).] He also pioneered research on managing semi-structured data, and, recently, research on data provenance, annotations, and digital curation.

In computational biology, he is known for his work on reconstructing phylogenetic trees [Peter Buneman (1971), "The recovery of trees from measures of dissimilarity", in Hodson, F. R.; Kendall, D. G. & Tautu, P. T., Mathematics in the Archaeological and Historical Sciences, Edinburgh University Press, pp. 387–395 .] based on Buneman graphs, which are named in his honor.

He is a fellow of the ACM, a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has won the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.He has chaired both flagship research conferences in data management, SIGMOD (in 1993) and VLDB (in 2008), as well as the main database theory conference, PODS (in 2001).

Buneman is the son of physicist Oscar Buneman.

Footnotes

References

* Peter Buneman's homepage: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/opb/