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Anastasia Ailamaki, an
associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University,
Pittsburgh, whose father is from Zakros, a small village near Sitia, is one
of 20 scientists chosen for this year's
European Young
Investigator (EURYI) Awards.
The
EURYI program is designed to attract outstanding young scientists from
around the world to create their own research teams at European research
centers.
Anastasia Ailamaki's
research focuses on database systems, and she is particularly interested in
addressing the peculiar problems of large, scientific databases such as
those used for earthquake or astrophysics simulations.
"We're
talking tens of terabytes, easily," Ailamaki said. “And these databases
cannot be managed by conventional database software designed for the banking
industry or for conventional data warehouses,” she explained. “So
researchers often end up using outmoded software or are forced to write
their own custom software for every project.”
Although born in Cyprus, the home of her mother, Anastasia Ailamaki lived
most of her life in Crete. When she was 27 she immigrated to the U.S. Prior
to that, she received her bachelor's degree in computer science at the
University of Patra, and master's degree from the Technical University of
Crete and the University of Rochester. She joined Carnegie Mellon after
earning her doctorate in computer science at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison.
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Professor Ailamaki, who was
awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2005 and a National Science
Foundation CAREER Award in 2002, will receive one million euros to establish
a research team at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in
Switzerland, where she is currently spending her sabbatical as a visiting
professor.
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