Alfonso Cárdenas is professor of in the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of California, Los Angeles; vice-chair of the University of California Information and Technology Planning Board; chair of the University of California - wide Academic Senate Information Technology and Telecommunications Policy committee; and a consultant in computer science and management at Computomata International Corporation, Los Angeles, California. He obtained a B.S. degree from San Diego State University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science, at the University of California, Los Angeles. His major areas of interest include database management, distributed heterogeneous and multimedia (text, image/picture, voice) systems, information systems planning and development methodologies, software engineering, and legal and intellectual property issues. He has been a consultant to both users and vendors of hardware and software technology.

Cárdenas has consulted for many organizations including IBM Corporation, The Rand Corporation, Arthur Young and Company, TTI/Citicorp, Farmers Insurance Group, Tandem (now Compaq) Computer Corporation, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Goodyear Atomic Corporation, General Dynamics, Hughes Aircraft, U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Internal Revenue Service, Cosa Liebermann Ltd., Banco Nacional de Mexico, Petroleos Mexicanos, and various law firms including Loeb and Loeb, O'Melveny and Myers, and Wilson, Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. He has consulted for law firms on the discovery process, obtaining and presenting evidence, and developing and evaluating alternative scenarios on various computer technology cases. He was visiting scientist/consultant to IBM Corporation from 1972-1975 on future database and applications generation technology.

Cárdenas has served as chairman and member of organizational and program committees for many conferences, and he has led many seminars and spoken to audiences in various countries. He is past-president (1984-1989) and member of the Board of Trustees of the Very Large Data Base Endowment, which conducts the annual International Conference on Very Large Data Bases. He has been a member of review boards for the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and various other institutions. He is co-editor with Dennis McLeod of the book Research Foundations in Object-Oriented and Semantic Database Systems (Prentice Hall, Inc., 1990), author of the book Data Base Management Systems (W. C. Brown Publishers, 1979 and 1984), co-editor and co-author of Computer Science (John Wiley & Sons Incorporated, 1972), and author of many other publications. He is an editor of the Information Systems Journal, and is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Society for Information Management.

Cárdenas is principal investigator of the NSF-supported Multimedia Stream System Project, co-principal investigator of the recently completed NSF-supported KMeD Project and of the NIH-supported Research, Education and Patient Care Facilitated by PACS Project. He is also the alumni coordinator of the Computer Science Alumni Advisory Board.

Recent activities include co-chairing of the NSF 1999 Information and Data Management workshop; organizing committee members of the NSF 2000 Information and Data Management workshop and "Bio-Informatics R&D and IDM in the Next Decade" panel co-chair; steering committee member of the NSF 2001 Information and Data Management workshop; program co-chair of the 2003 Visual Languages and Computing Conference; and various University of California administrative/management committees, including member of the search committee for the dean of UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, and search committee for the chancellor of the University of California, Riverside.

Cárdenas served on the CCST Council from 2004-2009.