Jeffrey Ullman


Jeffrey David "Jeff" Ullman is an American computer scientist and the Stanford W. Ascherman Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, at Stanford University. His textbooks on compilers, theory of computation, data structures, and databases are regarded as standards in their fields.

Early life and career

Ullman received a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering Mathematics from Columbia University in 1963 and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 1966. He then worked for several years at Bell Labs. From 1969 to 1979 he was a professor at Princeton. Since 1979 he has been a professor at Stanford University, where he is currently the Stanford W. Ascherman Professor of Computer Science. In 1995 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and in 2000 he was awarded the Knuth Prize. Ullman is also the co-recipient of the 2010 IEEE John von Neumann Medal,
"For laying the foundations for the fields of automata and language theory and many seminal contributions to theoretical computer science."
Ullman's research interests include database theory, data integration, data mining, and education using the information infrastructure. He is one of the founders of the field of database theory, and was the doctoral advisor of an entire generation of students who later became leading database theorists in their own right. He was the Ph.D. advisor of Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google, and served on Google's technical advisory board. He is currently the CEO of Gradiance. He teaches a course on Automata and Mining Massive Datasets on the Stanford Online learning platform.
Ullman was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.

Controversies

Ullman claims in his personal page at Stanford to be against the Iranian government, but it's also alleged that he has demonstrated anti-Iranian sentiments. In one case, he responded to an email from an Iranian student who had inquired about admission at Stanford with an off-topic political rant and went on to say that he would not help Iranian students even if he could:
And even if I were in a position to help, I will not help Iranian students until Iran recognizes and respects Israel as the land of the Jewish people. I know that you may not hold the same insane position as the mullahs that run your country, but it is a matter of principle. If Iranians want the benefits of Stanford and other institutions in the US, they have to respect the values we hold in the US, including freedom of religion and respect for human rights.

Following that the National Iranian American Council issued a formal complaint to Stanford University, to which Stanford spokesperson, Lisa Lapin responded that Ullman was expressing his own personal views and not the views of the University, that "he has no involvement in admission, and Stanford doesn't discriminate in their admission process"

Books