Abstract
Dr. Stephane Bressan will present his new book "Introduction to Database Systems" and discuss the rationale of teaching and learning database concepts in a scientific or engineering IT curriculum.

Biography
Dr. Stephane Bressan (steph@nus.edu.sg) is a senior fellow in the Computer Science department of the School of Computing (SoC) of the National University of Singapore. He joined the National University of Singapore in 1998. He is the coordinator of the Electronic Commerce Laboratory at SoC. He graduated in 1987 with a degree in Computer Science, Electronics and Process Automation from the Ecole Universitaire D'Ingenieurs de Lille (France) and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1992 from the Laboratoire D'informatique Fondamentale of the University of Lille. From 1988 to 1994, he taught Database Systems, Expert Systems, Knowledge Representation, and Logic Programming at several institutions including the Ecole Universitaire d'Ingenieurs de Lille, the Centre National des Arts et Métiers, the Centre de Recherche et d'Etudes DOcumentaires, or the D.E.A. de Technologies Biomedicales de Lille. In 1990, he joined the European Computer-industry Research Centre (ECRC) of Bull, ICL, and Siemens in Munich (Germany). In 1994, he was appointed site leader of the Database Platform project and principal investigator and work-package manager for the European IDEA ESPRIT project on Intelligent Databases. From 1996 to 1998, he was a research associate at the Sloan School of Management of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) working on the Intelligent Integration of Information. Dr. Bressan's main areas of research are information and knowledge management, Web applications and services, the integration of distributed and heterogeneous information systems, the design and implementation of databases management systems. His work has been published and presented at various occasions including the 1995 G7 summit on the Information Society, the 1995, 1997 and 2000 ACM-SIGMOD conference on the management of data, or the 1996 and 2000 conference on Extending DataBase Technology. He is also a reviewer for several conferences and journals.