Yannis Ioannidis - Biography

Yannis Ioannidis is the current president of ACM. He is a Professor of Informatics & Telecom at the U. of Athens, Greece (27 years). Before that, he was a Professor of Computer Sciences at the U. of Wisconsin-Madison (11 years). He has also served (10 years) as the President and General Director of ATHENA, the only Research & Innovation Center in Greece focusing exclusively on information technologies.

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, data infrastructures and digital repositories, recommender systems and personalization, and interactive digital storytelling. His work is often interdisciplinary, motivated by problems that arise in the Life, Physical, and Social Sciences, the Humanities, and the Arts. He has published over 170 articles, holds 4 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, he is a co-chair of the Global Climate Hub of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and he serves on the Advisory Board of the Destination Earth Initiative and the steering committee of the IEEE Int'l Conf. on Data Engineering.

An ACM member since 1983, in addition to serving as President, he has served as ACM Secretary/Treasurer, SIGMOD (SIG on Management of Data) chair and vice-chair, and member of the ACM Europe Council, the SIG Governing Board Exec Committee, the ACM Publications Board, and the ACM Digital Libraries Board. He has been a CACM associate editor, the faculty advisor of the ACM Student Chapter of his university, and the organizer of the first 3 ACM Europe Summer Schools, on Data Science. In 2017 he received the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award.