Janis A. Bubenko jr

Janis A. Bubenko is born 1935 in Riga, Latvia. The family immigrated to Sweden in 1945. He received a MSc in civil engineering (Chalmers Univ. of Technology, 1958), a Licentiate of Technology in Structural Mechanics (Chalmers, 1965), and a Ph.D. in Information Systems (Royal Inst. of Technology, 1973). He was awarded the degree of “docent” (similar to habilitation) in 1974. He was appointed professor of Computer and Systems Sciences at University of Gothenburg and Chalmers Univ. of Technology in 1977 and remained there until 1981. In 1981 he was appointed professor at the Royal Institute of Technology and University of Stockholm (KTH/SU). He retired in February 2000. During his years as professor Janis Bubenko has guided and promoted more than 20 Ph.D. and licentiate students to their degrees. He has since 1965 developed and taught numerous University courses at the graduate as well as at the undergraduate levels.

After four years as manager of systems and programming at the U.S. computer company Univac Scandinavia 1961 - 1965, he returned to Royal Inst. of Technology and research in 1965. In 1969 he founded the research group CADIS (Computer Aided Design of Information Systems) at the department of Computer and Systems Science, at KTH/SU in Stockholm. In CADIS he was the initial designer of an associative database management system CS1, which later was developed into a commercial Swedish product DREAM/CS5. During 1976 he had a visiting post-doc position at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, USA. His six-month sabbatical in 1995 was spent at the Polytechnic University of Catalunya, Barcelona.

In 1980, Bubenko founded the research laboratory SYSLAB, still active at KTH/SU. At SYSLAB, research in information systems, requirements engineering, business engineering, databases, and in software engineering is performed. In SYSLAB he was, among other things, in charge of the development of an initial version of a meta-case tool (RAMATIC), which later was further developed and exploited in a number of projects for CASE tool development. In the first half of the eighties SYSLAB had an annual research funding from STU (the Swedish Board for Technical Development) of about 5 MSEK.

In 1984 he initiated the establishment of the Swedish Institute for Systems Development, SISU, and was its Managing Director during 1985-92. SISU was initially supported by the public research board STU, and by more than twenty Swedish companies and organizations. In the late eighties, Bubenko initiated SISU's participation in a number of European Community projects such as KIWIS, TEMPORA, MILORD, NATURE, and F3.

Bubenko is the author/co-author or editor of eight influential textbooks in the areas of Information Systems Development Methods, Performance Analysis of Data Processing Systems, Operating Systems, Databases, and Conceptual Modeling Methods. He is the author/co-author of more than 140 research reports and published articles. Current research includes Requirements Engineering and Enterprise Modeling methods, as well as Information System modeling and design issues. He has participated in leading positions in European Community-funded projects such as KIWIS, TEMPORA, F³, NATURE, ELEKTRA., and HYPERKNOWLEDGE.

Bubenko has been invited speaker at nomerous international conferences (IFIP Congress 80, CAiSE*92, , RE´95 - Second IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering, etc.), at universities such as University of Tampere, Technical university of Helsinki, Danish Society for Datalogy, University of London, INFOTECH, London, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, IBM Research, San José, NTH Trondheim, University of Texas at Austin, Politecnic University of Catalunya, University of New York, University of Antwerpen, University of Latvia, University pf Karlstad, etc., as well as at events arranged by the European Commission.

Bubenko has also been engaged as opponent in several PhD dissertation acts as well as a numerous occasions of being member of graduation committees in PhD dissertations. Opponent-ships include Technical Univ. of Helsinki 1975 (Reijo Sulonen), KTH 1979 (P.Svensson), Stockholm University, 1979 (B. Nilsson), NTH Trondeim, 1980, (H Oftedahl), NTH, 1983, Leiden University, 1992 (G. Ramacker), and several more. During the eighties-nineties Bubenko was also frequently engaged as member of an external expert committee in evaluating applicants for positions as professors in Sweden as well as internationally. Bubenko has evaluated applicants for professors positions at University of Göteborg, University of Lund, University of Uppsala, University of Umeå, Royal Insttitute of Technology, Stockholm, University of Tampere, Finland, Norwegian Institute of Technology, Trondheim, University of Oslo, Copenhagen Business School, UMIST, Manchester, UK, University of Twente, the Netherlands, and several more.

Bubenko was the general chairperson of IFIP TFAIS (Theoretical and Formal Aspects of Information Systems) working conference 1985, Sitges, CAISE'90 Stockholm, EDBT'94 in Cambridge, U.K., and IFIP 8.1/13.2 Joint Working Conference on Domain Knowledge for Interactive System Design, Geneva, 1996. He was program co-chair of the VLDB (Very Large Data Bases) Conference in 1978 in West Berlin, of CAISE'91 (Conference on Advanced Information System Engineering) in Trondheim, the Baltic DB'94 workshop on National Infrastructure Databases in Vilnius, ADBIS'95 in Moscow, WITS'98 in Helsinki, and the first conference on History of Nordic Computing (HiNC-1) in Trondheim 2003. He has been Programme Committee member of more than 50 international conferences and is/has been member of the Editorial Advisory Boards of BIT (Nordisk Tidskrift för Informationsbehandling), the Journal of Information Systems, the Information Systems Journal, Data and Knowledge Engineering, the International Journal of Intelligent and Co-operative Information Systems, and the Journal of Information Technology & Management. As initiator of the CAiSE conference series as well as of the Baltic DB&IS conference series, Bubenko has been member of the advisory committees of these conferences since their beginning.

He has been employed as expert an reviewer by NSF (National Science Foundation), the European Commission, and national research foundations (or similar) in UK, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, Ireland, Latvia, and Austria. Bubenko was vice president of the VLDB Endowment in 1985 - 1989, and was its president 1990 - 1993. He is a member of ACM, IEEE Computer Society, and IFIP Working Group 8.1. He is also member of the board of the EDBT Foundation (Extending Data Base Technology). Earlier (1967 – 77) Bubenko was the Swedish representative in IFIP TC3, and also a member of WG 2.9.Among other things he actively participated in TC3’s design of one of the first curricula for systems developers (1969-74).

When the collaboration between Nordic countries was still intense (1960-1990), Bubenko took active part in Nordic co-efforts and conferences with papers and presentations. Bubenko has also been a consultant to several Swedish organizations (e.g. Dagens Nyheter, Trygg Hansa, Bonnierdata, Vägverket, Göteborgs Bank, and others) and companies in the area of systems development and data processing. He was also engaged by Swedish government agencies for various investigations regarding development and use of IT in the society.

In 1999 Bubenko was contracted as scientific expert by the Knowledge Foundation of Sweden in the program “Promote IT”. The role of the Knowledge Foundation is to boost Sweden's international competitiveness and increase employment in the country by supporting the exchange of knowledge and competence between Sweden's institutions of higher education, by funding research at Sweden's new universities and university colleges, and by promoting the use of IT. The “Promote-IT” program was allocated 22 MEUR during five years to increase the number of graduated teachers at universities and university colleges in Sweden. Bubenko has also been the program chair/co-chair of three national conferences in the “promote-IT” program since 2001.

In 2003 Sweden’s National Agency for Higher Education appointed Bubenko chair of a commission consisting of six Nordic professors and six Swedish students to evaluate the education at twenty Swedish universities and university colleges in the discipline of Computer and Systems Science/Informatics. The report was delivered 30 March, 2004.

Since the late nineties Bubenko has also been engaged as international expert by the Higher Education Quality Evaluation Centre of Latvia. In this position Bubenko has had the responsibility to evaluate educational programs in topics of IT for accreditation at the bachelor, masters as well as at the PhD level. Bubenko has examined programs at Riga Technical University, University of Latvia, and at university colleges in Liepaja, Jelgava, Daugavpils, and Valmiera (forthcoming).

In 2004 Bubenko was awarded a honorary doctorate by Riga Technical University, Latvia. The same year he was appointed ACM Fellow. In 2010 he was awarded a honorary doctorate by University of Latvia.

Updated March, 2010