Professor Eric Yu (left) with Peter Chen, in whose name the award was established in 2008. The winner receives a plaque and a cash prize sponsored by Elsevier Publishing Company.
Professor Eric Yu has received the top award in conceptual modeling for his outstanding contributions to the field. The 2019 Peter P. Chen Award, named after the inventor of entity relationships (ER) modelling, was presented to Professor Yu at the annual Conceptual Modeling (ER) conference held in Brazil last month.
The decision was unanimous in favor of Professor Yu based on his “outstanding scientific contributions and extensive professional services in the areas of conceptual modeling and requirements engineering.” ER modeling (or ERD’s) is extensively used in information systems analysis and design, and is taught in Faculty of Information courses INF1003, INF1341 and INF1343.
Professor Yu is well known for his contribution to intentional modeling in the conceptual modeling and requirements engineering communities, particularly with what’s known as the i* framework.
His Requirements Engineering (RE’97) paper introducing i* won the most influential paper at RE’07, and has over 1,700 citations according to Google Scholar. Since his PhD thesis in 1995, Professor Yu and his colleagues, including many Masters, PhD and postdoctoral students, have produced a number of i* refinements, extensions and applications to a wide variety of domains.
The i* framework now has hundreds of related research papers, tools, project, and industrial applications. Professor Yu has over 17,000 citations and a h-index of 57, according to Google Scholar. Material on the i* Framework has been incorporated into many conceptual modeling and requirements courses the world over.
Within the ER community, he has published 11 articles in the ER Conference between 1994 and 2016. He co-founded and co-organized the RiGIM workshop series (now MREBA) in the ER Conference and served as the program co-Chair for ER’2008 and ER’2014. In addition, Professor Yu has been a co-investigator for several industrial projects, including IBM, Bell Canada, Loblaw and Siemens (USA).
The presentation of the Peter P. Chen Award was made at the 38th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER’2019) conference, during the gala dinner in the courtyard at a historic convent in Salvador, Brazil. Professor Yu has been invited to give a keynote address at next year’s ER conference in Vienna. The conference, originally known as the International Conference on the Entity-Relationship Approach, was renamed to reflect the broad scope of conceptual modeling today.
Initiated by Elsevier in 2008, the Peter P. Chen Award honors one person each year for his or her outstanding contributions to the field of conceptual modeling. The winner receives a plaque and a prize of $2,500 sponsored by Elsevier Publishing Company
