Foundational Challenges in Data and Knowledge Management

A special event in honor of Georg Gottlob’s influential and long-lasting research contributions in the fields of database systems and artificial intelligence as an intellectual foreplay for EDBT/ICDT joint conference.

Even though Georg Gottlob describes himself as “a passionate theoretician who is spending nights proving theorem, or as least trying to”, he has been together with his colleagues in Vienna and Oxford deploying his research-based knowledge on practically relevant problems.

Georg Gottlob (Photo: Nadja Meister)

Georg Gottlob´s pioneering contributions to the theory, language design, algorithms, and systems in Web data extraction resulted not only in new methods which are reunifying the artificial intelligence (AI) and database techniques, but they also contributed to successful spin-offs (Lixto, Wrapidity) of research projects funded by European Research Council (ERC), thus creating technological transfer, jobs, and permanently impacting not only the local livelihoods but also the international data intelligence industry.

Professor Gottlob was responsible for building up a strong research group on theoretical foundations of databases and AI at TU Wien, part of Logic and Computation Institute of Faculty of Informatics. After leaving Austria in 2006 to take on his appointment in Oxford, he was trusted with the specific mission to build a similar database theory group also abroad. While at Oxford University, the ties with TU Wien, and the research groups which created Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms – VCLA, have not gotten weaker. The Algorithms and Complexity Group led by Gottlob´s co-speaker in LogiCS doctoral college, Professor Stefan Szeider (TU Wien), has influence Georg Gottlob´s efforts to kick off the Algorithms Group at the University of Oxford, now led by Leslie Goldberg.

Affiliations and Awards

Georg Gottlob is a Professor of Computing Science at Oxford University, UK and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the Vienna University of Technology, Austria (TU Wien) within the DBAI group of VCLA. Gottlob has received the Wittgenstein Award from the Austrian National Science Fund (FWF), ERC Grants, is an ACM Fellow, an ECCAI Fellow, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OEAW), the German National Academy of Sciences, and the Academia Europaea. He chaired the Program Committees of IJCAI 2003 and ACM PODS 2000.

Last but not least, Georg Gottlob is the member of the international advisory board of Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms, and current speaker of LogiCS doctoral college: Logical Methods in Computer Science, where PhD positions are funded by Austrian National Science Fund (FWF).

Keynote speakers

Christoph Koch, EPFL
Sihem Amer-Yahia, Laboratory LIG
Shqiponja Ahmetaj, TU Wien and Andreas Pieris, University of Edinburg
Francesco Scarcello, DIMES Unical, University of Calabria
Pablo Barcelo, University of Chile
Thomas Schwentick, TU Dortmund
Phokion Kolaitis, University of California

Program

Click here

Organizers

Michael Benedikt, University of Oxord
Michael Morak, TU Wien
Reinhard Pichler, TU Wien

Interview

Mining for new knowledge in big data: BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, recently interviewed 2018 Lovelace Medal winner, Professor Georg Gottlob, who is currently leading an international group on web data extraction and wrangling. Full Interview: http://bit.ly/LoveBigData