Paris Kanellakis

Paris Kanellakis was a Greek American theoretical computer scientist born in Athens on December 3, 1953, who worked on the theory of databases and distributed systems. He earned his diploma from the National Technical University of Athens and his doctorate from MIT under Christos Papadimitriou, then held positions at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, INRIA, and Brown University, where he became IBM Associate Professor of Computer Science. His research addressed the complexity of concurrency control for distributed databases and other foundational questions in database theory. He died in a plane crash near Buga, Colombia on December 20, 1995, at the age of 42, and the Association for Computing Machinery named its annual Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award in his honor, recognizing theoretical accomplishments with significant impact on practice.