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Alonzo Church Award
Prof. Wim Martens is one of the co-winners of the 2026 Alonzo Church Award. The award is one of the major awards in computer science and is dedicated to outstanding contributions to logic and computation.
Prof. Martens received the award because of the paper "Querying Graphs With Data" (J. ACM 2016). When designing modern query languages for graph databases, the international standardization organization (ISO) has used two papers from the current century as the scientific basis for their proposal for SQL/PGQ and GQL. These were "Querying Graphs with Data", by Leonid Libkin, Wim Martens, and Domagoj Vrgoc, and the paper "Regular Queries on Graph Databases", by Juan Reutter, Miguel Romero, and Moshe Vardi. A third paper, "Querying Regular Graph Patterns" by Pablo Barcelo, Leonid Libkin, and Juan Reutter was recognized for laying the groundwork for compositionality in graph query languages.
One can note that conference versions of both "Querying Graphs with Data" and "Regular Queries on Graph Databases" appeared at the International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT).