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Vita and Publications of Georg Gottlob

December 2003

1  Short Bio, Education and Professional Experience

• 30th June 1956    Birth in Vienna, Austria
• 1962 - 1974    "Lycée Français" school, Vienna, Austria.
• 28th June 1974    High School Diploma (Baccalauréat)
• 1974 - 1979    Mathematics and Computer Science studies at the Vienna University of Technology
• 13th Dec. 1979    Diplomingenieur (M.Sc.) in Computer Science. Thesis: "Simulation of interactively guided streetcar networks"
• May 1980 - April 1082    University Assistant at the "Institut für Angewandte Informatik und Systemanalyse" (Institute of Applied Computer Science and Systems Analysis) at TU Wien (Vienna Univ. of Technology).
• June 1981     "Doktor der technischen Wissenschaften" (Ph.D), cum laude, TU Wien, "Multivalued Logic - Structure and Application in Computer Science"
• Sept. 1982 - Dec. 1984    Research Associate at Politecnico di Milano, Department of Electrical Engineering.
• December 1983    Marriage with Laura CARLOTTA
• Jan. 1984 - Dec. 1984    Chief consultant of the industrial research project DATANET-SAD: Development and implementation of a distributed file-server for Olivetti Microcomputers, Milano (Italy), A.R.G.-S.P.A.
• Jan. 1985 - Feb. 1988    Research Associate at the Institute of Applied Mathematics of C.N.R. (Italian National Research Council), Genoa, Italy.
• Jun.-Sept.1985 and 1986    Research Scholar at Stanford University (Invited by Gio Wiederhold) and lecturer of the course "Distributed Databases" (jointly with S.Ceri)
• Winter semester 1986/87    Tought "Theory of Data and and Knowledge Bases" at Vienna University of Technology.
• June-July 1987    Research Scholar and Lecturer at Stanford University.
• Since 1st March 1988    Professor of Computer Science at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), "Institut für Informationssyteme" (Institute of Information Systems).
• Oct. 1989 - Sept. 1996    Director of the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Expert Systems (Laboratory for basic research in the field of expert systems, located at TU Vienna but industrially funded).
• Since 1988    Chairman of the Database and AI Division of the Information Systems Department of TU Vienna (currently 20 employees).
• 1991 - 1998    Chairman of the Information Systems Department of TU Vienna.
• Summer semester 1993    Sabbatical at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
• July 1998 Recipient of the Wittgenstein Award.
• Spring term 1999    Invited McKay Professor at the Computer Science Division, EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley.
• May 1999 Elected Corresponding Member of the Austrian National Academy of Sciences.
• March 2001 Reappointed Chairman of Information Systems Department.
• November 2001 Co-Founder of the Lixto Software GmbH company (www.lixto.com), a spin-off of TU Wien offering software and services for data extraction and integration. Lixto was a finalist in the 2003 World Technology Award competition.
• February 2002 Visiting Professor, Université Paris VII, Denis Diderot.

2  Research Interests

• Database Theory
• Semistructured data, XML
• Data Extraction and Integration
• Problem decomposition techniques based on graphs and hypergraphs
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
• Complexity in AI and Logic Programming
• Complexity Theory
• Finite Model Theory and Descriptive Complexity
• Computational Logic.

3  Professional Activity

• Invited conference talks.

  - BTW 2005: 12th Conference of the German Computer Science Society on Database Systems for Business, Technology, and the Web ( 12. GI-Fachtagung Datenbanksysteme für Business, Technologie und Web), Karlsruhe, Germany, Winter 2005.

  - 23 ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT- SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS 2004) Paris, France - June 14-16, 2004

  - Third International Symposium on Foundations of Information and Knowledge Systems (FoIKS 2004), Vienna (Austria), February 17 - 20, 2004.

  - IEEE/WIC International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology, (WI/IAT-03), Halifax, Canada, Oct. 13-16, 2003.

  - LICS 2002, IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, Copenhagen, Denmark, July 2002.

  - Logics in Artificial Intelligence JELIA'02, Calabria, Italy, September 2002.

  - Ninth International Workshop on Nonmonotonic Reasoning NMR 2002, Toulouse, France, April 2002.

  - Symposium on the Effectiveness of Logic in Computer Science (ELICS), Saarbruecken, Germany, March 4-6, 2002.

  - Invited system demo and paper at Intern. Workshop on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning (LPNMR), Vienna, 2001.

  - 26th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS'01), Mariánské Lázne, CFR, 2001.

  - 5th International Conference on Developments in Language Theory (DLT'01), Vienna, July 16-21, 2001.

  - 7th International Conference on Logic Programming and Automated Reasoning (LPAR 2000), Reunion Island, Frankreich, November 2000.

  - DEXA'99 Database and Expert Systems Applications, Florence, Italy, August/September 1999

  - International Symposium on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR'96), Cambridge, MA, Nov. 1996.

  - 11th International Logic Programming Symposium (ILPS), Ithaca, NY, 1994.

  - Logics in Artificial Intelligence JELIA'94, York, UK, 1994.

  - 12th International Conference on Fundamentals of Computation Theory, (FCT'97), Krakow, September 1997.

  - Second Intern. Workshop on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning (LPNMR), Lisbon, 1993.

  - International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS), Prague, 1995.

  - International Summer School on Logic Programming, Alghero, Italy, June 1996.

  - Conference on Inductive Logic programming (ILP'97), Prague, September 1997.

  - Italian Artificial Intelligence Conference 1997, Rome, Sept. 1997.

  - LLC'99 Third International Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation, Batumi, Georgia, September 1999.

  - Workshop on Proof Theory, Complexity and Meta-mathematics, Kurt Gödel Society, Vienna, April 1994.

  - European Conference on Computer Assisted Systems Theory (EUROCAST), Innsbruck, 1995.

  - First COMPULOG Net Meeting on Knowledge Bases, Munich, 1992.

  - Logic Colloquium 95, Haifa, Israel, 1995. Workshop on Nonmonotonic Reasoning.

  - Finite Model Theory Workshop, Oberwolfach, Germany, 1998.

  - Workshop on Finite Model Theory and Implicit Complexity, at FLOC'99, Trento, July 1999.
• Other Invitations and visits. Over 100 talks at different european and US universities or research institutions (which are not listed in detail). Research and teaching activity at a number of different universities, e.g. Stanford University (overall 9 month), UNAM Mexico (intensive course, 1 week), ETH Zürich (sabbatical), UC Berkeley (visiting professor), Paris VII (visiting professor).
• Awards and Scholarships.
  • 1979 President Schärf Award and Scholarship.
  • Italian Government Scientific Visitor Scholarship (1982).
  • Award of the Italian Society of Electrical Engineers, 1988 (with P. Paolini and R. Zicari).
  • Medal from Helsinki University for scientific achievement in Computer Science. 1995.
  • Senior Fellow of the Christian Doppler Society, 1996.
  • 1998 Wittgenstein Award
  • 1999 Invited McKay Professor at the Computer Science Division, EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley.
  • Elected Corresponding Member of the Austrian National Academy of Sciences. 1999.
  • 1999 Best Paper Award (with F. Scarcello and M. Sideri) at the 5th International Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning. El Paso, Texas.
  • 2000 Honorary Scientist of the Guizhou Academy of Sciences, Guyang, Guizhou, China.
  • 2002 Best Paper Award (with Ch. Koch) at the 21st ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS), Madison, Wisconsin, June 2002.
  • 2002 Visiting Professor, Université Paris VII, Denis Diderot.
  • 2002 Fellow of ECCAI, the European Artificial Intelligence Society.
• Chair and membership of program committees.
  Chairs:
  • Program Chairman of IJCAI'03, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Acapulco, Mexico, 2003.
  • Program Chairman of the 19th ACM SIGMOD SIGACT SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS'2000), Dallas, Texas.
  • Co-chairman of the program committee for the International Conference on Database Theory 1995 (together with co-chair Moshe Vardi).
  • Program co-chairman for the 1998 Computer Science Logic conference (CSL'98). Co-chair was Prof. Etienne Grandjean.
  • Chairman of the program committee of the international workshop on Expert Systems in Engineering, 1990, (together with co-chair Prof. Wolfgang Nejdl). 50 participants
  Member of approximately 70 program committees of which a brief selection is provided here:

  - Intern. Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2001 (IJCAI'01).

  - Constraint Programming (CP'01), Cyprus, 2001.

  - 16th American National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'98), 1998.

  - ACM SIGMOD Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS), 1998.

  - European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), 1996.

  - Intl. Symposium on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR) 1994, 1998.

  - Intern. Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP), 1997.

  - Intern. Conference on Computational Complexity , (CCC) 1997 (Former name: Structure in Complexity Theory)

  - IEEE Symp. on Logic in Computer Science, (LICS) 1996.

  - ACM SIGMOD Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS), 1994.

  - International Conference on Data Engineering, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1991.

  - International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT), 1988, 1992 (Org. Chairman).

  - International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) 1989, 1990, 1995.

  - International Conference on Deductive and Object-Oriented Databases (DOOD91), 1991, 1994.

  - Symposium on Mathematical Fundamentals of Database and Knowledge Base Systems (MFDBS), 1991.
• Editor and Coeditor of Journals. Editor in Chief of AI Communications. Currently or previously on the editorial/advisory boards of the following scientific journals:
  • Journal of Computer and System Sciences
  • IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Journal of Applied Logic
  • Web Intelligence and Agent Systems
  • Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (Area Editor)
  • Journal of Discrete Algorithms
  • Informatica
  • Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science
  • Very Large Databases (VLDB Journal, 1993-1998)
  • Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (1996-98)
  • Computing (1992-1996)
  • Journal of Logic Programming (1997-2000)
  • Journal on Information Processing and Cybernetics (1994-1996)
  • Annals of the Kurt Gödel Society.
• Membership of scientific advisory boards.
  Since 1997 head of the LPNMR Steering Committee. LPNMR is is an association organizing world wide scientific activities on logic programming and nonmonotonic reasoning (former head: Prof. Anil Nerode, Cornell University). Member of the scientific advisory board of the European Association for Computer Science Logic (EACSL), of the European Association of Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS), of the Kurt Gödel society (KGS; vice president of this society from 1990-1995), of the institute of computer science of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) in Cosenza, Italy, and of the SOFSEM Seminars in the Czech Republic.
• Membership of EU Networks of Excellence: Network of Excellence COLOGNET (Computational Logic), GAMES (Games-Theory and Logic), REWERSE Foundations of the Semantic Web).In the past: COMPULOG (Computational Logic) and IDOMENEUS (databases).

4  Teaching

4.1  Academic Teaching

Among others, the following courses were taught:

• Database Systems. This course has been regularly taught at TU Wien since 1988. It is an required undergraduate course of the CS curriculum at TU Wien.
• Expert Systems. This course was regularly taught at TU Wien between 1988 and 1993. It was a required undergraduate course of the CS curriculum at TU Wien.
• Web Information Agents, TU Wien, 2000/2001. Graduate Course.
• Complexity Theory, TU Wien, 1996 and 1997. This was a special course for graduate and Ph.D. students.
• Introduction to Programming for Electrical Engineers. This course was regularly taught at TU Wien between 1991 and 1994. It is a required undergraduate course of the EE curriculum at TU Wien.
• Database Theory, TU Wien, 1986/87. This was a special course for graduate and Ph.D. students.
• Distributed Databases, Stanford University, summer terms 1985, 1986, 1987. This course, co-taught with Stefano Ceri, was a facultative course at the EE and CS Depts. of Stanford University.
• Organization and supervision of more than 20 seminars at TU Wien. A seminar - in this context - is a semestrial monographic course where students learn to deal with scientific literature and to present scientific results.

4.2  Supervision of Master Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Since 1988 supervision of approximately 60 master theses and 20 Ph.D. theses. The following is a selection of Ph.D. theses.

Wolfgang Nejdl: "Query Processing in a Deductive Prolog/RDBMS System", 1988. (W.Nejdl is currently Professor of Computer Science in Hannover, Germany.)

Michael Schrefl: "Object-Oriented Database Integration", 1989, co-advised with principal advisor Prof. Erich Neuhold. (M. Schrefl is currently Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern Australia at Adelaide.)

Thomas Frühwirth: " Types in Logic Programming", March 1990. (T. Frühwirth is currently a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Ulm, Germany)

Gerhard Friedrich: "Improvements in Model-Based Diagnosis", 1990. (G. Friedrich is currently Professor of Computer Science at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria).

Marcus Stumptner: "Redundancy and Information Content of Data Relations with different Kinds of Null Values", 1990. (M. Stumptner is currently a Professor of Computer Science at the University of South Australia in Adelaide).

Thomas Eiter: "On Transversal Hypergraph Computation and Deciding Hypergraph Saturation", 1991. (Th. Eiter is currently Professor of Computer Science at TU Vienna).

Wolfgang Slany: "Fuzzy Scheduling", 1994. (W. Slany is currently a Professor of Computer Science at TU Graz.)

Franz Wotawa: "Applying Model-Based Diagnosis to Software Debugging of Concurrent and Sequential Imperative Programming Languages", 1996. (F. Wotawa is currently a Professor of Computer Sciene at TU Graz.)

Helmut Veith: "Succinct Representation and the Complexity of Logic and Database Query Languages" (H. Veith is curently a Professor of Computer Science at TU Munich, Germany)

4.3  Nonacademic Teaching

• Various courses held for the industry (Italy, Austria, and US). The topics include Software Engineering, Database Design, Knowledge Based Systems, Distributed Databases, and Database Administration. A detailed list is omitted.
• Organisation, design and effectuation of a curriculum "Database Professional" at the Institute Fernando Santi in Genoa, Italy, 1985. This EU funded course consisted of more than 500 hours of lecturing, lab, and industry stages. The students were unemployed seamen with a high school degree. The course was very successful: 90 percent of the attendees found a job immediately after accomplishment.

5  Entrepreneurial Activity

Georg Gottlob is co-Founder of Lixto Software GmbH (see www.lixto.com). The company, which was founded in late 2001 describes itself as follows.

Company Overview

Lixto Software GmbH is a privately held company located in Vienna, Austria. We are a spin-off of Vienna University of Technology and EC3 Electronic Commerce Competence Center. Lixto Software GmbH provides solutions for automatically accessing, transforming, and syndicating data from the Deep Web. Lixto delivers extraction and transformation services to mobile and web service providers and application software providers which are significantly easier to use through visual support and significantly cheaper to operate and support through their superior design and robustness. Lixto has been conceived to support and extend the vision of the "semantic web" as outlined by Tim Berners Lee - to make it much easier for computers and humans to access, understand, and further process web content.

Company Focus

Lixto turns classic web pages into meaningful, structured data. The processes of access, transformation and syndication is supported. There is a wide range of applications which can benefit from Lixto. Lixto focuses on markets where the procurement of outside web intelligence in a structured form, ready for further processing is crucial to the success of a business. These markets include System Integrators, Corporate IT Managers and Web Developers, Mobile and Internet Content providers and Software manufacturers.

Company Vision

The company vision is to enable a wide range of customers to benefit from the power of extracting and processing highly individual and complex information. This can be fulfilled in a highly automated fashion from the World Wide Web in their business applications. The methods are strongly superior to highly repetitive human tasks performed today. Great savings in cost and productivity will be achieved by having Lixto access, transform and syndicate information, which is traditionally done with human support. Lixto will enable break through ease of use and accelerate time to market for Lixto based solutions. For several years a group of scientists from the Vienna University of Technology has been working on this vision.

Company Mission

The company mission is to build a highly profitable business and leading European marketshare with the strongest system integration and software application providers.

6  References

References will be provided on request.

7  List of Publications of Georg Gottlob

Click here to go to my publications or go to http://www.gottlob.net/?Full List