Yannis Ioannidis - Biography

Yannis Ioannidis is a Professor of Informatics & Telecom at the U. of Athens, Greece (since 1997). Prior to that, he was a professor of Computer Sciences at the U. of Wisconsin-Madison (1986—1997). He has also served as the President and General Director of ATHENA, the only Research & Innovation Center in Greece focusing exclusively on information technologies (2011-2021).

He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Sciences (U. of California-Berkeley), an MSc in Applied Mathematics (Harvard U.), and a Diploma in Electrical Engineering (Nat’l Technical Univ. of Athens).

His research interests include database and information systems, data science, data and text analytics, scalable data processing, recommender systems and personalization, and digital storytelling. His work is often multidisciplinary, motivated by problems that arise in the Life, Physical, or Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts. He has published over 160 articles, holds 3 patents, and has co-founded one start-up based on the results of his group’s research.

Ioannidis is an ACM and IEEE Fellow (essentially both "for contributions to database systems, particularly query optimization"), a member of Academia Europaea, and a recipient of several research and teaching awards, including Presidential Young Investigator, UW Chancellor's Teaching Award, VLDB 10-Year Best Paper, and Xanthopoulos-Pnevmatikos Award on Outstanding University Teaching (handed by the President of Greece).

He has been leading OpenAIRE, the open access infrastructure in Europe, for over a decade, and he serves on the Advisory Board of the Destination Earth Initiative, the Exec Board of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures, and the steering committee of the IEEE Int'l Conf. on Data Engineering.

An ACM member since 1983, he has served as ACM Secretary/Treasurer (2018-2020), SIGMOD (SIG on Management of Data) chair (2009-2013) and vice-chair (2005-2009), and as a member of the ACM Europe Council, the SIG Governing Board Exec Committee, and the ACM Publications Board. Currently he serves on the ACM Digital Libraries Board, is a CACM associate editor, the faculty advisor of the ACM Student Chapter of his university and will chair the ACM Europe Council Working Group on summer schools, having organized the Council’s first 3 summer schools, on the topic of Data Science. In 2017 he received the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award.