Gerhard Weikum (born September 28, 1957) is a German computer scientist and Research Director at the

Max Planck Institute for Informatics The Max Planck Institute for Informatics (German: ''Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik'', abbreviated ''MPI-INF'' or ''MPII'') is a research institute in computer science with a focus on algorithms and their applications in a broad sense. It host ...

Saarbrücken Saarbrücken (; Rhenish Franconian: ''Sabrigge'' ; ; ; ; ) is the capital and largest List of cities and towns in Germany, city of the state of Saarland, Germany. Saarbrücken has 181,959 inhabitants and is Saarland's administrative, commerci ...

, Germany, where he is leading the databases and information systems department. His current research interests include transactional and distributed systems, self-tuning database systems, data and text integration, and the automatic construction of

knowledge base In computer science, a knowledge base (KB) is a set of sentences, each sentence given in a knowledge representation language, with interfaces to tell new sentences and to ask questions about what is known, where either of these interfaces migh ...

s. He is one of the creators of the YAGO knowledge base. He is also the Dean of the International Max Planck Research School for Computer Science (IMPRS-CS). Earlier he held positions at

Saarland University Saarland University (, ) is a public research university located in Saarbrücken, the capital of the German state of Saarland. It was founded in 1948 in Homburg in co-operation with France and is organized in six faculties that cover all major ...

in Saarbrücken, Germany, at

ETH Zurich ETH Zurich (; ) is a public university in Zurich, Switzerland. Founded in 1854 with the stated mission to educate engineers and scientists, the university focuses primarily on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. ETH Zurich ran ...

, Switzerland, at MCC in

Austin, Texas Austin ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of Texas. It is the county seat and most populous city of Travis County, Texas, Travis County, with portions extending into Hays County, Texas, Hays and W ...

, and he was a visiting senior researcher at

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

Redmond, Washington Redmond is a city in King County, Washington, United States, located east of Seattle. The population was 73,256 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. Redmond is best known as the home of Microsoft and Nintendo of America. The city h ...

. He received his diploma and doctoral degrees from the

TU Darmstadt Tu or TU may refer to: Language * Tu language * Tu (cuneiform), a cuneiform sign * ''tu'' or ''tú'' the 2nd-person singular subject pronoun in many languages; see personal pronoun * T–V distinction (from the Latin pronouns ''tu'' and ''vos'') ...

, Germany. He acted as the President of the VLDB endowment in 2005 and 2006. The endowment organizes the yearly ''International Conference on Very Large Databases'', a scientific conference for researchers in the area of database research. In 2005 the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...

appointed Gerhard Weikum a

fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned society, learned or professional society, p ...

, one of the highest honors of the ACM. Weikum has been honored for his research in the fields of databases and information systems, in particular for his contributions to improve the reliability and the performance of large-scale, distributed information systems. In 2010 he was elected as a fellow of the

Gesellschaft für Informatik The German Informatics Society (GI) () is a German professional society for computer science, with around 20,000 personal and 250 corporate members. It is the biggest organized representation of its kind in the German-speaking world. History The ...

and received a Google Focused Research Award. He received the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award in 2011, an ERC Synergy Grant in 2013, and the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award in 2016. In 2018 he became a member of the

German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina The German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (), in short Leopoldina, is the national academy of Germany, and is located in Halle (Saale). Founded on 1 January 1652, based on academic models in Italy, it was originally named the ''Academi ...

References

External links

Max Planck Institute for Computer Science - databases and information systems department

Personal Homepage of Gerhard Weikum

International Max Planck Research School for Computer Science

University of Darmstadt

VLDB Endowment

ACM Fellows Program
{{DEFAULTSORT:Weikum, Gerhard 2005 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Database researchers Living people German computer scientists Max Planck Institute for Informatics Technische Universität Darmstadt alumni Academic staff of ETH Zurich Members of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina Max Planck Institute directors 1957 births People from Frankfurt