Description | Peter Buneman is distinguished for his advances in uniting programming languages and databases. On the theoretical side this has involved new results in types, monads and structural recursion including (with his student Ohori) type inference for record types, and (with Tannen iet al) results that demonstrated a tight connection between monad-based languages and those based on the predicate calculus. On the application side, he used these techniques to demonstrate that - contrary to an assertion by the US Department of Energy - queries on existing non-relational genomic databases could be directly evaluated; fruitful collaboration with biologists ensued. This research carries over into his recent study of the principles of semistructured or "web-like" data. He is a leading proponent of this new field, and co-author of the first text book in it. Another recent concern is with the provenance of data on the Web, where data is continually copied and transformed. Already, with Khanna et al. he has built an efficient archiving system for scientific databases; more fundamentally, he seeks a formal basis for tracing provenance. In addition to his work in databases, Buneman's early work on mathemaical phylogeny underlies most modern phylogenetic reconstruction techniques. |