Short Bio of Prof. Georges Gardarin

    Georges Gardarin was born in Riom, France, on February 19, 1947. He enters Ecole Normale Supérieure de l'Enseignement Technique in 1968. From 1971 to 1978, he was assistant professor at Paris VI University. During that period, he was also consultant at Ordoprocessor where he built a computer system, and at Renault where he designed a new distributed information system. He did his PhD Thesis in 1978 on Concurrency Control in Distributed Databases at University of Paris VI. From 1978 to 1980, he was visiting professor at UCLA, California. He published several papers on concurrency control and database integrity, notably with Profs. W. Chu and M. Melkanoff.

    From 1980 to 1990, he was professor at Paris VI University, teaching databases and distributed systems. He was also chief-scientist at INRIA where he headed the Sabre project, which was developing an object-relational parallel DBMS. From 1990 to 2000, he created and developed the PRiSM Research Laboratory, associated to the CNRS and to the new University of Versailles Saint-Quentin.

    On the industrial side, Georges created  two companies. The Infosys startup, founded with his PhD students in mid of 80’,  has been created to industrilize two research products: a relational database system (Sabrina) and a database CASE tool (Secsi).  After 7 years activity, the Company has been sold to EDS. In January 2000, he created XMLMedia, a start-up he founded with industrial partners. The start-up was developing XML middleware to store and publish XML on top of classical DBMSs. The resulting products are currently distributed by several licensed companies, one version being distributed in open source by Odonata.

   From January 2003, he is back Professor at the University of Versailles. He is leading a team developing projects on data integration and mining. An extended mediator with intelligent wrappers based-on text mining has notably been developed.

   Georges has written more than 120 papers in international journal and conferences, and several books in French, some of them being translated in English and Spanish. He wrote the most known French database book and has more recently published a book on XML and information systems. Georges has chaired many conferences as general chair or program chair or honorary chair, including VLDB (1981, 1986, 1991), EDBT (1996, 2008), SIGMOD (1986). He has been a member of VLDB foundation during 12 years.