News & Events

The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens has bestowed the title of an honorary doctor (Dr. honoris causa) on Gerhard Weikum, in recognition of his contributions to the fields of databases, world wide web, and artificial intelligence.

Gerhard Weikum received the 2016 SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award for his pioneering work on the automatic construction of large knowledge bases. The award is given annually in recognition of innovative and highly significant contributions in the field of database systems.

Maximilian Dylla received the Dissertation Award of the German Computer Science Society (Gesellschaft für Informatik, GI) in the area of Databases and Information Systems for his dissertation titled Efficient Querying and Learning in Probabilistic and Temporal Databases. The award is given every two years and recognizes the best PhD theses in the field. The ceremony took place during the 2015 Database Systems for Business, Technology, and Web Conference (BTW), which took place in Hamburg.

Rainer Gemulla has been selected as a Junior Fellow of the German Computer Science Society (Gesellschaft für Informatik, GI). The award was created in 2013 to recognize the best young researchers in computer science.

Gerhard Weikum receives the 2011 SIGMOD Contributions Award for outstanding service to the database community. The award recognizes his influence on collaboration and publication culture that helped to maintain high standards of quality in face of tremendous growth and broadening of the area. Gerhard Weikum served as PC Chair of SIGMOD, ICDE, and CIDR. As the president of the VLDB Endowment he encouraged adoption of journal-style reviewing culture to combine the best of the conference and journal reviewing process.

Gerard de Melo and Gerhard Weikum have received the Best Interdisciplinary Paper Award at the 19th ACM International Conference on Information Knowledge Management (CIKM 2010), for their paper MENTA: Inducing Multilingual Taxonomies from Wikipedia. The 2010 edition of the ACM CIKM received a total of 945 full paper submissions, out of which two best papers were chosen based on the votes of an Award Committee consisting of renowned experts from multiple fields. Additionally, Gerard de Melo received a Student Travel Award for the conference.

Gerhard Weikum has been selected as a member of acatech, the German Academy of Science and Engineering. The organization represents the interests of German sciences and technology and supports policy makers and society with technically qualified evaluations and recommendations. Being recommended and accepted for membership requires a high scientific standing, which is assessed by procuring expert opinions from third parties. Gerhard Weikum was welcomed into the organization on October, 19, 2010, at the academy's annual meeting in Berlin.

Gerhard Weikum has been selected as a fellow of the German Computer Science Society (Gesellschaft für Informatik, GI). GI Fellows are selected for outstanding scientific contributions to the field of computer science or to the Society. The award was presented in September 2010 at theINFORMATIK 2010 in Leipzig. 

For his 2008 doctoral dissertation Automated Construction and Growth of a Large Ontology, Fabian Suchanek has received the 2010 SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award Honarable Mention. The annual SIGMOD Dissertation Award recognizes excellent research by doctoral candidates in the database field. This award, which was previously known as the SIGMOD Doctoral Dissertation Award, was renamed in 2008 with the unanimous approval of ACM Council in honor of Dr. Jim Gray.

Two outstanding dissertations have received Honorable Mention recognizing their excellent theoretical foundations and development of algorithms with outstanding performance gains and impact in highly relevant applications. Among them Martin Theobald for his PhD thesis TopX: Efficient and Versatile Top-K Query Processing for Text, Structured, and Semistructured Data. The annual SIGMOD Dissertation Award recognizes excellent research by doctoral candidates in the database field. For 2006, 15 extremely high-quality dissertations were nominated by their departments. The dissertations were evaluated by the SIGMOD Dissertation Awards Committee for technical depth and significance of the research contribution, potential impact on theory and practice, and quality of the presentation. All submissions were of extremely high quality and SIGMOD congratulates all the nominated students and their departments for their excellent work and contributions to our field.

The Awards Committee: Hans-Joerg Schek (Chair), Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Sophie Cluet, Tamer Ozsu for Jim Gray, Masaru Kitsuregawa, Gail Mitchell, Beng Chin Ooi.

The awards have been presented at the newly established SIGMOD Award Ceremony Session.