Won Kim

2018 Distinguished Academic Achievement Alumni Award

Won Kim (PhD CS ’80) is a distinguished professor in the Department of Software at Gachon University in Seongnam, Korea, and managing director of the National Program of Excellence in Software.

also has deep experience in industry and is considered a pioneer of object-oriented database technology, object-relational database technology, and information integration technology. He is also recognized as an expert in data management, knowledge discovery, and Internet technology.

In 2006, when he was recognized with the ACM SIGKDD Service Award, Kim was cited as instrumental in creating SIGKDD, including serving as its first chair.  He also served as the Chair of ACM SIGMOD for nearly a decade. In 1995, he was elected ACM Fellow “for fundamental insights into query optimization in relational databases, support for engineering applications, and functionality and architecture of object-oriented databases, and for extensive editorial service.”

Kim has worked as a researcher at IBM’s Almaden Research Center and at Microelectronics and Computer Corp. He was the founder and CEO of UniSQL, Inc. and Cyber Database, Inc., before becoming senior vice president and software advisor at Samsung Electronics.

He also later served as an advisor to a number of other companies, among them Zener Systems and LG Electronics