Assessing the Impact of Jeff D. Ullman

1
Assessing the Impact of Jeff D. Ullman

• Peter P. Chen
• Computer Science Dept
• Louisiana State University
• Pchen_at_lsu.edu, www.csc.lsu.edu/chen
• (Presented at Ullmans Retirement Symposium,
  Stanford Univ., Dec. 6, 2002)

2
Outline

• How to assess the impact of a scientist?
• Scope and Limitations of this study
• Research Methodology and Tools
• Research Results
• Personal Note
• Conclusions

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How to Assess the Impact of a Scientist?

• Usability
• Actual Implementation, Tested in Real World
• Number (or Percentage) of Users
• Citation
• Number of Citations of the Most Cited Paper
• Number of Total Citations
• Research Pioneering Leadership
• Scope, number of papers, time length,
• Number of the followers
• Education Influence
• Academic Family Tree Productivity and Paper
  Citations of the nodes in the Family Tree
• Book Leadership

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Scope of this Study

• Focusing on Jeff Ullman
• Many speakers today already discussed the
  Usability and Research Pioneering Activity
  Dimensions, we did not do such study to avoid
  duplication
• Concentrating on the Paper Citation and Education
  Influence Dimensions (including influence on me)

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Research Methodology Tools

• Using Primarily CiteSeer, supplementing with
  other databases and search engines
• Discovering various problems many data errors,
  inconsistencies
• Analysis of the Academic Tree posted at JDUs
  home page himself
• Building an user interface to the database for
  simple queries
• Comparing with the CS faculty in 5 universities

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Education Influence of Jeff Ullman

• Academic Family Tree
• One of the Largest in Computer Science
• Probably the largest in DB
• Productivity and Citation Index of People in the
  Academic Tree
• One of the Most Productive and Most Cited Group
  of Researchers
• Book Leadership

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Analysis of Data of Ullmans Academic Family Tree

• How many generations?
• Which generation has most people?
• And what is the of people?
• What is the total number of nodes?
• Which generation is most productive and
  influential (in terms of)?
• Most number of publications/person
• Highest average number of citations?
• Who is the most
• Productive?
• Influential?

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Analysis of Data of Ullmans Academic Family Tree

• How many generations? 5
• Which generation has most people? 2nd
• And what is the of people? 121
• What is the total number of nodes? 249
• Which generation is most productive and
  influential (in terms of)?
• Most number of publications/person? 1st, 18.05
• Highest average number of citations? 1st, 163.34
• Who is the most
• Productive? Howard Siegel, 373
• Influential? Larry Petterson (1985, 3rd G.)
• 1684, Student of D. Commer/R. Sethi

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Comparisons of JDUs Family with CS Depts

• See separate spreadsheets
• (Note the spreadsheets are not linked at this
  time. Will be linked in the near future)

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How is Jeff ranked in the Citation Dimension?

• CiteSeer maintains two useful statistics
• Most Cited Author
• Most Cited Documents (including books and
  articles)
• Warning
• CiteSeer data contains a lot of errors
• However, it is useful as a rough estimate,
  particularly for not very common last names

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Cumulative Citations of Jeff Ullmans Publications

• Out of 629, 254 authors in the CiteSeer DB
• Jeff is ranked as No. 2
• The total number of citations of all Jeffs
  publications is 10592

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Individual Publication Citations of Jeff Ullman

• How many Jeffs publications are ranked in the
  top 200 based on CiteSeer Data as of September
  2002?
• Answer 5

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How many JDUs publications are ranked in the top
200?

• 12.   Doc     Context   1455   4 John Hopcroft
  and Jeffrey Ullman. Introduction to Automata
  Theory, Languages, and Computation. Addison
  Wesley, 1979.
• 21.   Book   Context   1171   2 A.V. Aho, J.E.
  Hopcroft, and J.D. Ullman, The Design and
  Analysis of Computer Algorithms, Addison-Wesley,
  Reading, MA, 1974.
• 26.   Book   Context   1107   1 A.V. Aho, R.
  Sethi, and J.D. Ullman, Compilers Principles,
  Techniques, and Tools., Addison-Wesley, 1986. 
• 42.   Doc     Context   849   Ull88 Ullman J.
  D. Principles of Database and Knowledge-Base
  Systems, Volumes 1 and 2. Computer Science Press,
  1988.
• 66.   Doc     Context   635   23 A.V. Aho, R.
  Sethi, and J.D Ullman. Compilers Principles,
  Techniques and Tools. March 1988.

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Book Leadership

• JDM is the author or co-author of
• 5 most cited books
• Many best selling textbooks
• Usually one of the first textbooks in a
  particular topic/field
• Model textbooks for other textbook writers to
  follow

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When did I meet with JDU the First Time?

• ???
• Need the help from Dave Maier and Alberto
  Mendelzon (two great historians) to dig out old
  historical data and compare notes.
• Between 1974 to 1978, there was a DB workshop at
  Bell Lab.
• JDM was there
• Al Aho was there, too (?)

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Reasons Why I am here

• As a member of DB Community
• As a person who have been benefited from his book
  leadership
• Jeffs book on Principles of Database Systems,
  is probably the first book starting with the ER
  Model first
• Other DB textbooks follow

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Conclusions (1)

• JDM has made very significant impact in computer
  science
• Ranked No. 2 in total citations
• 5 Most cited books and articles in top-200 cited
  publications
• Best-Selling Book Author
• One of the largest and most productive academic
  family tree
• The DB community (particularly myself) has been
  benefited from JDU
• Today, we pay tribute to him (to make an acyclic
  graph to a cyclic graph

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Conclusions (2)

• The DB community (particularly myself) has been
  benefited from JDU
• Today, we pay tribute to him (to make an acyclic
  graph to a cyclic graph)

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Conclusions (3)

• We are here today to say to one of the greatest
  computer Scientists
• Dr. Jeff D. Ullman, Thank You!