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Homepage: Gerhard Weikum

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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, and the Konrad Zuse Medal in 2021.

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

Selected Talks

  • Knowledge Graphs 2021: a Data Odyssey,
    Keynote at VLDB Conference,
    Copenhagen, August 18, 2021
    Slides
  • 15 Years of Knowledge Graphs: Achievements, Challenges, Opportunities,
    Invited Talk at Web Conference 2021 Future of the Web,
    Ljubljana, April 21, 2021
    Slides
  • 15 Years of Knowledge Graphs: Achievements, Challenges, Opportunities,
    Invited Talk at Bloomberg
    London and New York City, November 16, 2020
  • 15 Years of Knowledge Graphs: Achievements, Challenges, Opportunities,
    Invited Talk at Global Artificial Intelligence Technology Conference (GAITC)
    Hangzhou, July 27, 2020
  • 15 Years of Knowledge Graphs: Achievements, Challenges, Opportunities,
    Keynote at Italian Database Conference (SEBD)
    Villasimius (Sardinia), June 22, 2021
  • Beyond Knowledge Graphs: New Frontiers of Machine Knowledge,
    Invited Talk at Wiki Workshop at the Web Conference (WWW)
    Lyon, April 21, 2021
  • What Computers Should Know, Shouldn't Know and Shouldn't Believe,
    Invited Talk at TempWeb Workshop at the Web Conference (WWW)
    Perth, April 21, 2021
  • What Computers Should Know,
    Keynote at China Conference on Knowledge Graph and Semantic Computing,
    Beijing, September 22, 2016
    Slides
  • Adventure in Data,
    Awards Session of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data,
    San Francisco, June 30, 2016
    Slides
  • What Computers Know, Should Know, and Shouldn't Know,
    Keynote at 19th International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB),
    San Francisco, June 26, 2016
    Slides
  • What Computers Know, Read and Understand,
    Plenary Talk at Annual Meeting of the Max Planck Society,
    Saarbruecken, June 16, 2016
  • Knowledge Graphs: From a Fistful of Triples to Deep Data and Deep Text,
    Invited Talk at Australasian Database Conference,
    Melbourne, June 5, 2015
    Slides
  • Big Text: from Names and Phrases to Entities and Relations,
    Keynote at ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM),
    Shanghai, November 5, 2014
    Slides
  • Big Text: from Language to Knowledge,
    Keynote at Brazilian Symposium on Databases (SBBD),
    Curitiba, October 7, 2014
    Slides
  • Big Text: from Language to Knowledge,
    Keynote at Annual Conference of the German Society for Computer Science (GI-Jahrestagung),
    Stuttgart, September 24, 2014
    Slides
  • Knowledge Harvesting in the Age of Big Data Analytics (jointly with Fabian Suchanek),
    Tutorial at International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB),
    Hangzhou, September 3, 2014
    Tutorial page
  • Knowledge Harvesting in the Big-Data Era (jointly with Fabian Suchanek),
    Tutorial at ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data,
    New York, June 26, 2013
    Tutorial page
  • Knowledge Harvesting from Text and Web Sources (jointly with Fabian Suchanek),
    Tutorial at IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE),
    Brisbane, April 9, 2013
    Tutorial page
  • Semantic Search: from Names and Phrases to Entities and Relations,
    Keynote at VLDS Workshop 2012,
    Istanbul, August 31, 2012
    Slides
  • Knowledge Harvesting from the Web (Récolte des Connaissances de la Toile),
    Lecture at Collège de France,
    Paris, May 16, 2012
    Slides
    Video
  • For a Few Triples More,
    Keynote at ISWC 2011,
    Bonn, October 27, 2011
    Slides
  • Database Researchers: Plumbers or Thinkers?,
    Keynote at EDBT 2011,
    Uppsala, March 24, 2011
    Slides
  • From Information to Knowledge: Harvesting Entities, Relationships, and Temporal Facts from Web Sources,
    Keynote at KONVENS 2010,
    Saarbruecken, September 8, 2010
    Slides
  • From Information to Knowledge: Harvesting Entities and Relationships from Web Sources,
    Invited Tutorial at PODS 2010,
    Indianapolis, June 7, 2010
    Slides   Paper
  • Heart of Gold: Searching and Ranking Web Nuggets,
    Keynote at KEYS 2010,
    Indianapolis, June 6, 2010
    Slides
  • Knowledge on the Web: Towards Robust and Scalable Harvesting of Entity-Relationship Facts,
    Keynote at DASFAA 2010,
    Tsukuba, April 1, 2010
    Slides
  • Harvesting, Searching, and Ranking Knowledge from the Web,
    Keynote at WSDM 2009,
    Barcelona, February 11, 2009
    Slides   Video
  • Harvesting and Organizing Knowledge from the Web,
    Talk at Microsoft Research,
    Redmond, June 2, 2008
    Slides
  • Harvesting and Organizing Knowledge from the Web,
    Keynote at ADBIS'07,
    Varna, October 1, 2007
    Slides
  • DB & IR: Both Sides Now,
    Keynote at SIGMOD'07,
    Beijing, June 14, 2007
    Slides
  • Peer-to-Peer Web Search with Minerva,
    Talk at Google,
    Mountain View, August 3, 2006
    Slides
  • Efficient Top-k Queries for XML Information Retrieval,
    Yahoo! Workshop on the Future of Web Search
    Barcelona, May 19, 2006
    Slides
  • Distributed Statistics for Peer-to-Peer Web Search,
    Workshop on Algorithmic and Numerical Aspects in Web Search
    Pisa, February 7, 2006
    Slides
  • Foundations of Automated Database Tuning,
    Tutorial (with Surajit Chaudhuri), ACM SIGMOD Conference, Baltimore, June 15, 2005
  • DELIS Highlights: Efficient and Intelligent
    Top-k Search in Peer-to-Peer Systems,
    Highlights of EU FET Projects on Complex Systems, Budapest, March 9, 2005
    Slides
  • Informations- und Wissensmanagement im Jahr 2025,
    Conference on Database Systems for Business, Technology, and Web (BTW)
    Karlsruhe, Germany, March 2, 2005
  • Towards a Statistically Semantic Web,
    International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER Conference)
    Shanghai, November 11, 2004
    Slides
  • The BINGO! System for Information Portal Generation and Expert Web Search,
    1st Semi-annual International Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR),
    Asilomar, California, January 6, 2003
    Slides (Powerpoint)
  • Self-tuning Database Technology and Information Services: from Wishful Thinking to Viable Engineering,
    10-Year Award Talk, 8th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB),
    Hong Kong, China, August 22, 2002
    Slides (Powerpoint)
  • Dependable Workflow Technology,
    EDBT Summer School, Cargese, France, August 27, 2002
    Slides Part 1 (Powerpoint), Slides Part 2 (Powerpoint)
  • The Index-based XXL Search Engine for Querying XML Data with Relevance Ranking,
    8th International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT), Prague, March 26, 2002
    Slides (Powerpoint)
  • Database Recovery - Heisenbugs, Houdini's Tricks, and the Paranoia of Science,
    Ringvorlesung of the Graduate Studies Program on "Quality Guarantees for Computer Science",
    Saarbruecken, Germany, February 18, 2002
    Slides (Powerpoint)
  • Quality of Service Guarantees for Multimedia Digital Libraries and Beyond,
    Invited Keynote, 10th International Conference on Management of Data (COMAD),
    Pune, India, December 15, 2000
    Slides (Powerpoint)
  • The Web in 2010: Challenges and Opportunities for Database Research,
    Informatics - 10 Years Back, 10 Years Ahead, Dagstuhl 10th Anniversary Conference,
    Saarbruecken, Germany, August 28, 2000
    Slides (Powerpoint)
  • Rethinking Database System Architecture: Towards a Self-Tuning RISC-Style Database System,
    26th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB),
    Cairo, Egypt, September 11, 2000
    Slides (Powerpoint)