St Cross Emeritus Fellow recognised by the Association for Computing Machinery

Emeritus Fellow Professor Dan Olteanu has been named an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Member 2025. The ACM is the leading international learned society for computing, with a global membership spanning academia and industry, and the Distinguished Member programme recognises significant professional achievements in computing beyond the norm. To be nominated, a candidate must have at least 15 years of professional experience in the field and five years of Professional ACM Membership in the last 10 years, and must have achieved a significant level of accomplishment or made a significant impact in the field.

This news comes in addition to Professor Olteanu’s achievement of Best Paper Award at ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) 2025, highlighting his contribution to one of the core challenges in data management: cardinality estimation. Often described as the Achilles’ heel of query optimisation, this problem involves estimating the size of a query’s result without executing it – a task central to the performance of modern database systems.

Professor Olteanu and his collaborators have developed a novel approach grounded in information theory, enabling the computation of guaranteed upper bounds on query output size. This work has advanced both the theoretical understanding and practical performance of database systems.