Brown CS News

“I don’t think retirement means much to Stan,” says Nesime Tatbul. Currently a Senior Staff Research Scientist for Intel Labs and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), she’s one of his former PhD students. After more than four decades as a Brown CS faculty member, Stan Zdonik is retiring at the end of this semester.

“It’s more than work-life balance,” she adds. “Stan finds fun everywhere: he enjoys everything he does, he has very diverse interests, and in all of them, he excels. He takes a professional approach and he’s a leader each time, but most of all, he cares about people. I haven’t seen a research group anywhere else that’s as positive, as family-oriented. Stan prioritizes people above everything else.” 

Stan Zdonik came to Brown University in 1983 after earning five degrees at MIT, culminating in a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Over the years, his teaching has included CS 4 Introduction to Computing with Pascal, CS 132 Introduction to Software Engineering, CS 191 Software System Design, and CS 296 Programming AI Systems, but it’s always centered on CSCI 1270 Database Management Systems and CSCI 2270 Topics in Database Management, which he taught continuously for his entire forty-three years.

Ugur Çetintemel, Khosrowshahi University Professor of Computer Science at Brown, agrees with Nesime that Stan is remarkable in several different dimensions: “He’s brilliant at brainstorming, but what’s special is the enjoyment and life energy he gets out of thinking on his feet. And he lives a full life outside of academia. I have my hobbies, too, but nothing as substantial as his! The richness of Stan’s life truly feels different.”

“And then all of that energy flows back into his work,” Ugur says, “letting him ask the really simple and very hard questions, the ones that you should have thought about but didn’t until you heard Stan mention them. He’s an old-school educator, thinking deeply instead of broadly, trying to understand things at first-level principles. All the while, he’s the most patient and nurturing advisor I’ve ever seen. Many times over the years, I wasn’t sure if a student could make it, and Stan wouldn’t give up, and I was always pleasantly surprised to see them turn the page and do truly great work by the end of their time at Brown.”

Over the years, Stan’s research interests have included database systems, alternative database architectures, data streams, complex analytics, and transaction processing. He has over one hundred peer-reviewed papers, some that have been cited more than a thousand times, and he co-developed several notable database projects, including the Aurora and Borealis stream processing engines; SciDB, a multidimensional array database management system (DBMS) designed for scientific workloads and data sets; H-Store, an experimental, main-memory, parallel DBMS; and C-Store, a DBMS that stores data by column and not by row. He’s a co-founder of StreamBase Systems, an event processing platform that analyzes real-time streaming data for decision-making purposes, and Vertica, an analytic database management software company.

Michael Franklin, Morton D. Hull Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, describes Stan as the perfect research collaborator. They first met in person when Franklin interviewed for a position at Brown CS and Stan had the unpleasant task of telling him that he didn’t get the job. 

“But he suggested that we work together,” Franklin remembers, “and I thought it was just a polite brush-off, but he was genuine. We got together, picked a really interesting problem to work on, and started collaborating. Stan is unique in a bunch of different dimensions: incredibly curious, super intelligent, and he’s a researcher in the best sense. He finds an idea intriguing whether or not it’s the most pragmatic thing to do at the moment.”  

“Stan was out in the forefront of several of the key research topics in the database community,” Franklin says. “He recognized early on that there was no inherent reason for the dichotomy between database systems and other systems to exist, and he was way ahead of everyone else in realizing that getting rid of that dichotomy was possible and important to do. I still love the work I did with Stan in designing systems that could work well in a very untraditional networking environment, and I love it because it was a great example of his creativity and enthusiasm. Databases is a very practical field with a lot of industry activity, and given that, people often wonder what role academic research will play. Stan’s work is a perfect answer to that question: only in academia can you unleash your creativity in all directions, get outside the limitations that everyone else is imposing on themselves, and then bring back practical outcomes.”

Nesime has vivid memories of her time doing research with Stan on the Aurora and Borealis projects, which were collaborations with MIT and Brandeis University: “Stream processing is about data that comes to you at high volume in real time, and you have to collect and process it quickly. We had to design and build an entirely new class of database, and we created one of the world’s first stream processing systems. Those years were unique: a big group, many students working together, and leaders from three different universities. Every time I worked with Stan, he came up with fascinating ideas. He always sees something interesting and different, and then his insights lead to fundamentally new approaches for very significant problems.”

“Stan did ground-breaking work in a few different research areas,” says Ugur. “Column-store architectures, stream processing, and object-oriented databases are all areas where he shone, but I really admire his object-oriented work in particular. He was a true thought leader, pushing the boundaries both in terms of semantics and efficient implementation. He really led the charge.”

Stan’s honors in the field of computer science include the Office of Naval Research’s Young Investigator Award, a Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) Test Of Time Award, an International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) 10-Year Best Paper Award, and an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) Best Demonstration Award. In 1993, he received a named chair and became the IBM Associate Professor of Computer Science, and in 2002, Stan and his collaborators received one of the Department’s largest grants at the time, aimed at creating software known as middleware, which enhances the interaction between a user and web servers. In 2006, he received one of the field’s highest honors by being named a Fellow of the ACM. 

Stan’s accomplishments in the world of music found recognition as well. Four years ago, the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) presented him with their Distinguished Achievement Award, noting his co-founding of the Boston Bluegrass Union in 1976 (he also served as its talent buyer, emcee, and first President), his service to IBMA (he was their Vice-Chairperson, Chairperson, and President), and his general ambassadorship for Northeast bluegrass for more than four decades. 

Michael Stonebraker is a Turing Award winner and Adjunct Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at MIT. He’s one of the rare individuals who has accompanied Stan as deeply into the world of music as he has in the field of computation. The two scientists were originally on opposite sides of a debate between object-oriented and relational databases, but they bonded over a shared love of bluegrass.  

“I don’t think any of us have any idea why we started playing bluegrass,” he says, “but it’s happy music – there’s no gloomy music on the banjo, which is what I play. Stan is an excellent mandolin player, a very accomplished musician, and we played together every couple of weeks for years with a guy named J.R. Robinson.”  

Stonebraker laughs when he remembers Stan’s careful driving, with his speed held at exactly five miles under the limit at all times, and how he’d sometimes complain about songs with notes that ranged too high, making it difficult to sing harmony a half-octave above the lead. 

“When we jammed together,” Stonebraker says, “something like ‘Billy in the Lowground’ would come to mind and he’d start playing it, and he’d say ‘we should learn that’, which meant that Stan already knew it and I should start learning it. A couple of his favorites were really, really difficult songs for a banjo player, but he was facile at all kinds of challenging tunes.”  

“And when we worked together on stream processing,” he says, “we complemented each other, because I’m good at the broad brush, presenting the big picture, and Stan had an amazing ability to work out the details: he’d stop me and ask what I meant by something at every step along the way. I think he’s an incredibly thoughtful scholar.”

Stonebraker also has high praise for Stan’s efforts as a promoter as well as deep appreciation for his teamwork: “He’s very passionate about bluegrass and wants to get the next generation of pickers picking. I was one of his new recruits! And I’ve enjoyed playing with him immensely because you figure out to work together – it’s basically improv, and Stan was really good at that. We played together for years, the three of us, and Stan was usually the highest pole in the tent. I got better by playing with him, and I’m grateful for that.”

As Ugur looks back over the years, what stands out is the personal impact that Stan has had on him over three decades, cemented by a work schedule that brought them together on a daily basis: “For a long time, Stan was my biggest collaborator across many different dimensions: co-advising students, doing research, working on our startup effort, writing grants together. His routine was that he’d swim in the morning, and his lunch was just a sandwich brought from home, but every day after lunch we’d get coffee together, and he’d talk about bluegrass or pen collecting or getting a great deal on a Toyota – about life!”

“Stan really cares about the people around him,” Ugur says. “He’s been a mentor to me, as well as a big brother and a friend. He held my hand when I was a junior faculty member and didn’t have my own research group, and he set a great example, always showing me different opportunities. If I’ve been successful in any way, I give him a lot of credit for that, and I know many other people feel the same.”

Nesime is equally emphatic about Stan’s ability to find and create opportunities for his students: “There are many things for a PhD student other than research and teaching, and I always appreciate how Stan gave me a taste of everything that could possibly prepare me for the rest of my career. Whether it was working with junior students to gain experience advising, writing grant proposals, or learning how to work with industry, it was all foundational.”

“Not to mention the incredible training in academic writing!” she says, explaining that her native language, Turkish, doesn’t include articles before nouns as they exist in English. One of her fondest memories is working hard to ensure that every “the” was in place when drafting a paper, only for Stan to find a missing one and gently tease her about it. “I always thought I had a version in which he wouldn’t find one, but he always did.” 

One of the most powerful moments in her career, Nesime says, was when she returned to  Stan’s team as a colleague and not an advisee: “When we were working on the S-Store project together, I remember all of the brainstorming and feedback sessions. I had so much fun with Stan and his students, just having group meetings at Brown, discussing research, and having coffee together. Before, I was on the student side, getting advice from Stan, and then there I was as a colleague, mentoring students together! That was a very special experience.”

 Without prompting, she uses the same word as Ugur, routine, to show the incredible value of focused time with a brilliant mentor who cares deeply about your work but also about you as a person. It’s something Nesime hopes that she and Stan’s other students can replicate with the next generation of computer scientists.

“I feel very fortunate and very proud and very grateful for knowing Stan and for learning from him,” she says. “He’s been the most influential role model and mentor in my life. In today’s world, we’re all multitaskers, and we do too many things. Visiting Stan’s research group for S-Store meetings reminded me to take a break from all distractions, focus on an interesting problem, and find uninterrupted time for deep research discussions with people that you care about. That’s Stan’s approach, and it’s brilliant, and I think all of his students and colleagues have seen its impact. We’re all carrying it forward now.”

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.