Samuel Madden (computer scientist)

Samuel R. Madden (born August 4, 1976) is an American computer scientist specializing in database management systems. He is currently a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Career
Madden was born and raised in San Diego, California. After completing bachelor's and master's degrees at MIT, he earned a PhD specializing in database management at the University of California Berkeley under Michael Franklin and Joseph M. Hellerstein. Before joining MIT as a tenure-track professor, Madden held a post-doc position at Intel's Berkeley Research center.

Madden has been involved several database research projects, including TinyDB, TelegraphCQ, Aurora/Borealis, C-Store, and H-Store. In 2005, at the age of 29, he was named to the TR35 as one of the Top 35 Innovators Under 35 by MIT Technology Review magazine. Recent projects include DataHub - a "github for data" platform that provides hosted database storage, versioning, ingest, search, and visualization (commercialized as Instabase), CarTel - a distributed wireless platform that monitors traffic and on-board diagnostic conditions in order to generate road surface reports, and Relational Cloud - a project investigating research issues in building a database-as-a-service. Madden has published more than 250 scholarly articles, with more than 59,000 citations, with an h-index of 101.

In addition, Madden is a co-founder of Cambridge Mobile Telematics and Vertica Systems. Before enrolling at MIT and while an undergraduate student there, Madden wrote printer driver software for Palomar Software, a San Diego-area Macintosh software company. He is also a Technology Expert Partner at Omega Venture Partners.

Awards and recognitions
Madden won a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2004 and a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2007.

He received VLDB's best paper award in 2007 and VLDB's test of time award in 2015 for his 2005 paper on C-Store.

He also received a test of time award in SIGMOD 2013 for his 2003 paper The Design of an Acquisitional Query Processor for Sensor Networks.

In 2020 he was named a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

He received the 2024 SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award for his contributions to multiple aspects of data management, including column-oriented database systems, high performance transaction processing, and systems for mobile and sensor data.