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Homepage: Gerhard Weikum

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Note: I am officially retired, and my professional activities are limited.
In particular, I cannot take any new students or postdocs.

Short Biography

Gerhard Weikum is a Scientific Director at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbruecken, Germany, and an Adjunct Professor at Saarland University. Earlier he held positions at Saarland University in Saarbruecken, Germany, at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, at MCC in Austin, Texas, and he was a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington. He received his diploma and doctoral degrees from the University of Darmstadt, Germany.

Gerhard Weikum's research spans transactional and distributed systems, self-tuning database systems, data and text integration, and the automatic construction of knowledge bases. He co-authored a comprehensive textbook on transactional systems, received the VLDB 10-Year Award for his work on automatic database tuning, and is one of the creators of the YAGO knowledge base which was recognized by the WWW Test-of-Time Award in 2018. Weikum is an ACM Fellow and a member of several academies. He received a Google Focused Research Award in 2010, the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award in 2011, an ERC Synergy Grant in 2013, the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award in 2016, the Konrad Zuse Medal in 2021, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens in 2024.

Research Interests

  • Distributed information systems
  • Database performance optimization (automatic tuning) and self-organization (autonomic computing)
  • Data and text integration
  • Web mining and text analysis
  • Knowledge base construction and curation