Ensuring data privacy was Dr. Alberto Mendelzon’s latest area of research before he passed away, after a two-year battle with cancer. Mendelzon, a computer and mathematical sciences professor who was based at U of T Scarborough, pioneered research that aimed to tame the World Wide Web.
Described as having a “unique” and “fun-loving” personality, Mendelzon was recognized by his colleagues as a leader in database theory.
Databases are collections of records and facts that become information when a user receives it, after a query or search. In the online academic world, researching for essays and papers often requires access to lists, or databases of academic journals that may include abstracts and the publication information needed to track the article down.
Indirectly, Mendelzon’s research has been influential in the practical world, benefiting businesses with applications such as Google Base and IBM’s DB2 Universal Database program.
The occasional blog-reader or writer also benefits from this research, which allows Google Base to separate multiple listings and items into more refined categories. For example, searching for a blog that is also a photoblog, is based in Toronto, and is oriented towards municipal politics will take a fraction of the time to carry out as the program, which is still in its “beta” stage, evolves.
Mendelzon laid the foundations for relational databases-research that has made searching on the web more efficient by reducing redundancy and duplication of data.
When he started teaching computer science at U of T in 1980, Mendelzon also began research into graphical query languages. In what colleagues hailed as “prescient” research into the area, Mendelzon researched the foundations and was a part of a project that looked into Structure Query Language for the World Wide Web (WebSQL).
The project aims to eliminate the “lost-in-hyperspace syndrome” that is often a result, for instance, of a search for “thevarsity” that returns 32 hits-including the “free encyclopaedia,” Wikipedia, and an entry for an Atlanta, Georgia restaurant chain.
In the flood of emails from around the world that followed news of his death, colleagues and friends expressed their personal thoughts and experiences of an university professor with whom you could discuss the latest Aerosmith and Coldplay albums, among other subjects.
“There will never be anyone like him,” said Dr. Gösta Grahne, who was Mendelzon’s co-author on a number of papers.
The busy professor also took many graduate students under his wing. They wrote in expressing their appreciation of a person who was not only helpful, but also played a role in shaping their way of “thinking about research problems and in determining what are the right questions to ask when trying to tackle them.”
“So many people seem busy and frazzled and ‘life kind of gets to them.’ He was very calm and at peace,” said computer science colleague Dr. Renee Miller, as she chuckled quietly.
The culmination of his research and influence was his election into the Royal Society of Canada, which he was informed of mere weeks before his passing on June 16, 2005.
This concludes our series of articles profiling U of T profs who were elected into the Royal Society of Canada this year. The new Fellows will be inducted into the Society at a ceremony on Sunday.
