Moshe Y. Vardi, a University Professor at Rice and one of the world’s leading computer scientists, has received the ICDT Test of Time (ToT) Award for his seminal work, Regular Queries on Graph Databases.
This award recognizes the research presented at the International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT) that has best met the "test of time" over the past decade. The awarding body cites the “broad influence of this framework across both theoretical and practical domains.”
Juan L. Reutter and Miguel Romero, both faculty members at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and Vardi’s co-authors, were also awarded.
"The recognized paper from 2015 closed a line of research on graph databases that I started in 1999,” said Vardi. “It was also the last paper in my line of work on database theory, which I started as an MS student in 1979. It is gratifying to see the paper recognized with a Test-of-Time Award."
In announcing the award, ICDT highlights the influence the work had on subsequent research on graph-query languages, including the new standard languages GQL and SQL/PGQ for graph databases.
At Rice, Vardi is the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering. His research interests focus on applications of logic to computer science, including database theory, finite-model theory, knowledge in multi-agent systems, and computer-aided verification and reasoning.
Vardi earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1981. After two tenures as a research scientist for IBM Research and continued work at Stanford University, Vardi joined the Rice faculty in 1993.
He has authored or co-authored more than 800 scientific papers. He is senior editor of Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), after serving as its editor-in-chief for a decade. He holds honorary titles from ten international universities.
Among his many honors are membership in the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences, Academia Europaea, and the Royal Society of London. Vardi is a fellow of ACM, IEEE, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Mathematical Society.
The ICDT ToT Award for 2025 will be presented during the EDBT/ICDT 2025 Joint Conference, held on March 25-28, 2025, in Barcelona, Spain.
The 2025 award committee consisted of Xiao Hu (University of Waterloo), Graham Cormode (University of Warwick), and Marcelo Arenas (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile).