Keynote Speakers

Amr El Abbadi is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his B. Eng. from Alexandria University, Egypt, and his Ph.D. from Cornell University. His research interests are in the fields of fault-tolerant distributed systems and databases, focusing recently on Cloud data management and blockchain based systems. Prof. El Abbadi is an ACM Fellow, AAAS Fellow, and IEEE Fellow. He was Chair of the Computer Science Department at UCSB from 2007 to 2011. He has served as a journal editor for several database journals, including, The VLDB Journal, IEEE Transactions on Computers and The Computer Journal. He has been Program Chair for multiple database and distributed systems conferences. He currently serves on the executive committee of the IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering (TCDE) and was a board member of the VLDB Endowment from 2002 to 2008. In 2007, Prof. El Abbadi received the UCSB Senate Outstanding Mentorship Award for his excellence in mentoring graduate students. In 2013, his student, Sudipto Das received the SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award. Prof. El Abbadi is also a co-recipient of the Test of Time Award at EDBT/ICDT 2015. He has published over 300 articles in databases and distributed systems and has supervised over 35 PhD students.

Professor Johann Gamper's main research areas are temporal databases, time series data, data warehousing and data analytics, approximate query answering, data summarization and graph matching. His research concentrates on database technologies with a focus on processing and querying temporal data. Johann Gamper is author of 120+ publications in international journals and conference proceedings, many of which are in the most prestiguous outlets of database systems (TODS, VLDBJ, TKDE, SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE). He regularly serves as reviewer for technical journals, PC member and organizer of conferences.

Doctor Ioana Manolescu is a Senior Researcher who leads of the INRIA/LIX CEDAR project-team, focused on Rich Data Exploration at Cloud Scale. She is also part-time professor at Ecole Polytechnique (Paris). Her research interests include models, tools and algorithms for data journalism and journalistic fact-checking; efficient ontology-mediated query answering; and cloud-based management of Web data. Ioana Manolescu is also member of the PVLDB Endowment Board of Trustees.

Elaine Toms is currently Professor of Information Innovation & Management, Management School, University of Sheffield, UK. She previously held posts at the iSchool, University of Sheffield; the Faculty of Management, and School of Information Studies, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada; and the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, also in Canada. She was the first information scientist to be appointed to a Canada Research Chair. Over the course of her career, she has held multiple administration roles (e.g., Director of Teaching Quality & Enhancement, and of Research); been actively engaged in professional associations including ASIST (serving on the Board of Directors); has served as program chair for multiple conferences (e.g., ASIST, Hypertext, and JCDL); and currently serves on the editorial board of IPM and is an associate editor of JASIST. She completed her PhD at Western University (Canada) from which she went on to examine multiple facets of the information interaction problem from interface issues to interruptions and task, with a particular focus on evaluation. Her work has been funded by multiple groups on both sides of the pond (e.g., both the science and social science research councils in Canada, OCLC, Heritage Canada, Canada Foundation for Innovation, Horizon 2020). She has been an investigator with multiple research networks (e.g., NECTAR, Network for Effective Collaboration Through Advanced Research; PROMISE (Participative Research labOratory for Multimedia and Multilingual Information Systems Evaluation).

Verónika Peralta is Associate Professor at the University of Tours, France, and a member of the Fundamental and Applied Computer Science Laboratory (LIFAT), since 2008. She received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Versailles and the University of the Republic of Uruguay in 2006. Her research interests include Data Quality, Data Warehousing, Exploratory Analysis, OLAP, Query Recommendation and Query Personalization. Her teaching mainly concerns Databases, Data Warehousing and Information Systems. She has taught multiple courses since 1996, in several universities of France, Uruguay and Argentina. She also has several years of professional experience as a data warehouse developer and consultant.