Ullman received a Bachelor of Science degree in
engineering mathematics from
Columbia University in 1963 and his PhD in
electrical engineering from
Princeton University in 1966. He then worked for three years at
Bell Labs. In 1969, he returned to Princeton as an associate professor, and was promoted to full professor in 1974. Ullman moved to
Stanford University in 1979, and served as the department chair from 1990 to 1994. He was named the Stanford W. Ascherman Professor of Computer Science in 1994,[4] and became an
Emeritus in 2003.[5]
Ullman's research interests include
database theory,
data integration,
data mining, and education using online infrastructure. He is one of the founders of the field of database theory: many of his Ph.D. students became influential in the field as well. He was the Ph.D. advisor of
Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google, and served on Google's technical advisory board.[8][9] He is a founder of Gradiance Corporation, which provides homework grading support for college courses.[4] He teaches courses on automata and mining massive datasets on the
Stanford Online learning platform.[10][11]
In 2011, Ullman stated his opposition to assisting Iranians in becoming graduate students at Stanford, because of the anti-Israel position of the Iranian government. In response to a call by the
National Iranian American Council for disciplinary action against Ullman for what they described as his "racially discriminatory and inflammatory" comments, a Stanford spokesperson stated that Ullman was expressing his own personal views and not the views of the university, and that he was uninvolved in admissions.[14]
In April 2021, an open letter[15] by CSForInclusion criticized the
ACM and the ACM A.M. Turing Award Committee for nominating and selecting Ullman as recipient of the ACM A.M. Turing award. ACM reconfirmed its commitments to inclusion and diversity in a response[16] to the letter.