Joseph M. Hellerstein is professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

, where he works on database system

Database system

A database system is a term that is typically used to encapsulate the constructs of a data model, database Management system and database....

s and computer network

Computer network

A computer network, often simply referred to as a network, is a collection of hardware components and computers interconnected by communication channels that allow sharing of resources and information....

s. After receiving a bachelors degree from Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 and a master's degree from UC Berkeley, he received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1995, for a thesis on query optimization

Query optimization

Query optimization is a function of many relational database management systems in which multiple query plans for satisfying a query are examined and a good query plan is identified. This may or not be the absolute best strategy because there are many ways of doing plans. There is a trade-off...

 supervised by Jeffrey Naughton

Jeffrey Naughton

Jeffrey Naughton is a Professor and the department chair of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He received a bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1982, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1987...

 and Michael Stonebraker

Michael Stonebraker

Michael Ralph Stonebraker is a computer scientist specializing in database research.Through a series of academic prototypes and commercial startups, Stonebraker's research and products are central to many relational database systems on the market today...

. He has made seminal contributions to many areas of database system

Database system

A database system is a term that is typically used to encapsulate the constructs of a data model, database Management system and database....

s, such as ad-hoc sensor networks, adaptive query processing, approximate query processing and online aggregation

Online aggregation

Almost all database operations are performed in batch mode, i.e. the user issues a query and waits till the database has finished processing the entire query. On the contrary, using online aggregation, the user gets estimates of an aggregate query in an online fashion as soon as the query is issued...

, declarative networking, and data stream processing.

His work has been recognized via awards including an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship

Sloan Fellowship

The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This is distinct from the Sloan Fellows in business....

, MIT Technology Review

Technology Review

Technology Review is a magazine published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was founded in 1899 as "The Technology Review", and was re-launched without the "The" in its name on April 23, 1998 under then publisher R. Bruce Journey...

's inaugural TR100

TR35

The TR35 is an annual list published by MIT Technology Review magazine, naming the world's top 35 innovators under the age of 35.Some of the most famous winners of the award include Larry Page and Sergey Brin , Linus Torvalds , Jerry Yang , Jonathan Ive , Mark Zuckerberg...

 list, and two ACM-SIGMOD

SIGMOD

SIGMOD is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Management of Data, which specializes in large-scale data management problems and databases....

 "Test of Time" awards. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery

Association for Computing Machinery

The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...

 (2009). Key ideas from his research have been incorporated into commercial and open-source database software released by IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

, Oracle Corporation

Oracle Corporation

Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...

, and PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL, often simply Postgres, is an object-relational database management system available for many platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, MS Windows and Mac OS X. It is released under the PostgreSQL License, which is an MIT-style license, and is thus free and open source software...

. He has also held industrial posts including Director of Intel Research Berkeley, and Chief Scientist of Cohera Corporation.