This July we lost a leading visionary scientist in the field of the database theory. Leonid Kalinichenko is known within scientific community for his pioneering works, scientific school established by him, the formation of two international scientific conferences run for two decades each.
the Field of Science and Technology for his works on system simulation. In 2010 he became a Honored Scientist of the Russian Federation.
For several decades Leonid Kalinichenko took an active part in facilitation of research in the field of databases. Since 1974 he was the Deputy Chairman of the Working Group on Software for Data Banks under the USSR State Committee on Science and Technology. He initiated the creation of the Moscow ACM SIGMOD Chapter in 1992 and became the permanent Chairman of the chapter. The monthly scientific seminar of the chapter operated since the chapter creation till the present time. 200 seminar meetings significantly influenced Russian community on databases and information systems.
He had successfully formed several international conferences including the European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS) in 1993 and Russian Conference on Digital Libraries (RCDL) in 1999. Leonid Kalinichenko acted as the permanent chair of the Steering committees of the conferences as well as chair (co-chair) of the Program committees of many conferences.
Last years his activities and works were devoted to problem solving in data intensive domains. In 2013-2016 he initiated several research projects aimed at conceptual modeling and data integration within distributed computational infrastructures.
In 2015 he initiated transformation of the RCDL conference into the International Conference on Data Analytics and Management in Data Intensive Domains (DAMDID) - a multidisciplinary forum of researchers and practitioners from various domains of science and research promoting cooperation and exchange of ideas in the area of data analysis and management in data intensive domains. The conference became a place for discussions on data access, analysis and management problems in astronomy, neurology, genomics, material science, biology.
In 2015 he also organized a master program entitled “Big data: infrastructures and methods for problem solving” at the Department of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics, Lomonosov Moscow State University to attract students in the field of multidisciplinary data analysis and management.
Leonid was a great scientist with a surprisingly deep knowledge of the state of art in his field of science, understanding the urgent directions of the development of science. But he was also a real scientific driver of the research team led by him at the Institute of Informatics Problems, a driver of conferences he established and scientific groups he contacted.
Leonid's passing away is a huge loss for the scientific community, his family, colleagues and friends.