Professor Emerita Renée J. Miller, a world-renowned pioneer in database systems, has been recognized for an illustrious career that has paired insightful research with industrial impact. She is a recipient of a 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award from CS-Can/Info-Can, Canada’s computer science academic association.
The award recognizes current or former faculty members in Canadian computer science departments, schools, and faculties who have made “outstanding and sustained contributions” to the field over the course of their careers.
During her career, Miller has contributed novel and significant research in the areas of data integration, schema mappings, and data quality, while also creating tools to integrate, transform, query, and analyze information.
In her PhD thesis, Miller worked on the problem of translating data from one database format ("schema") to another, so that databases can interoperate and data from different sources can be integrated. It is a topic she has revisited throughout her career.
In order both to avoid information loss and automatically translate queries when moving from one database schema to another, Miller demonstrated that the correct notion of equivalence between the two schemas should be based on information capacity. This new insight led Miller to establish a formal framework for schema equivalence and a suite of schema transformations that allowed for nontrivial schema modifications.
Miller also worked on the semi-automatic discovery of schema mappings. When done manually, the process of defining schema mappings is labour-intensive and can easily lead to errors. Miller and her colleagues at the IBM Almaden Laboratory formulated a solution and implemented a tool called Clio that IBM is now using to support the creation of schema mappings for its industrial projects. The research earned Miller several patents and spawned follow-up projects by other researchers.
Miller’s work contributed to the data integration paradigm known as data federation, in which full ownership and control of enterprise data is centralized. She also worked with her IBM colleagues to develop the theory of data exchange, which provided the conceptual foundation for the sharing of data between autonomous peers. This paradigm is especially important in the Internet age, and has been recognized as a seismic shift in how we think about the transformation of data.
Most recently, Miller’s work has considered open data. Governmental and private institutions adopt open data principles by ensuring that their data is complete, accurate, and available to all in a timely manner. But where open data may have improved accessibility of data, it has not necessarily improved the quality of data. She is currently exploring an alternative for open data that she calls Open Data Science, where the data and the way it has been prepared, cleaned, integrated, and analyzed is shared transparently.
Miller stands out not only as a preeminent researcher, but also as a leader who brings peers together to collectively advance the field in Canada and abroad.
In 2008, she launched an initiative to establish a network of Canadian researchers to advance the state-of-the-art on the topic of Business Intelligence (BI). (BI is the commercial term for using information within organizations to make informed decisions, and to run operations effectively based on available data.) The initiative included top Canadian academic database groups as well as industry-leading software companies in Canada and abroad, including Business Objects, Cognos, IBM, and SAP. It secured funding from NSERC’s strategic network program, more than $1 million in industry support, and has made Canada a hotbed for BI research.
“Professor Miller’s scholarly and applied research has been outstanding in quality, quantity, and breadth. Her research profile is unique in that it combines theoretical elegance, reflected by citations and scholarly awards, with industrial impact, reflected by patents and successful industrial products,” said Marsha Chechik, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science. “She has the insights and intuitions needed to ask the right questions, to make the right assumptions, and to conduct elegant research that has an impact on the research community as well as database practice.”
Miller is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a recipient of the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honour bestowed by the United States government on outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their careers.
She has received an NSF CAREER Award, the Ontario Premier’s Research Excellence Award, and an IBM Faculty Award. She has been named the Bell Canada Chair of Information Systems and a fellow of the ACM. She and her co-authors (Fagin, Kolaitis, and Popa) received the (10 Year) ICDT Test-of-Time Award for their influential 2003 paper establishing the foundations of data exchange.
Miller received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics and Cognitive Science from MIT.