Philip A. Bernstein is a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research. Over the past 40 years, he has been a product architect at Microsoft and Digital Equipment Corp., a professor at Harvard University and Wang Institute of Graduate Studies, and a VP Software at Sequoia Systems. He has published over 150 papers and two books on the theory and implementation of database systems, especially on transaction processing and data integration, and has contributed to a variety of database products. He is a Fellow of the ACM and AAAS, a winner of ACM SIGMOD’s E.F. Codd Innovations Award, and a member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. He received a B.S. degree from Cornell and M.Sc. and Ph.D. from University of Toronto.