Natassa Ailamaki Speaks Out on How to be a Systems Researcher and How to Manage a Large Research Group

Welcome to ACM SIGMOD Record's series of interviews with distinguished members of the database community. I'm Marianne Winslett, and today we're at the 2017 SIGMOD and PODS conference in Chicago. I have here with me Anastasia Ailamaki, who's a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, better known as EPFL. Before that, Natassa was a professor at Carnegie Mellon. She's an ACM Fellow, a Sloan Fellow, and received the European Young Investigator Award, as well as ten Best Paper awards. After this interview, she received the Edgar F. Codd Innovation Award from the ACM SIGMOD in 2019, and the Nemitsas Prize in Computer Science from the President of the Republic of Cyprus in 2018. Her Ph.D. is from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. So, Natassa, welcome!