Gerhard Weikum is a Research Director (and until Aug 2007, had also been the Managing Director) at the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science (MPI) in Saarbruecken, Germany, where he is leading the databases and information systems department. His current research interests include distributed information systems, P2P computing, database performance optimization (automatic tuning) and self-organization (autonomic computing), and intelligent organization and search of semistructured information. He is also the Dean of the International Max Planck Research School for Computer Science (IMPRS-CS).
Earlier he held positions at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, at MCC in Austin, Texas, and he was a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington. He received his diploma and doctoral degrees from the University of Darmstadt, Germany.
He currently acts as the President of the VLDB endowment, which organizes the yearly International Conference on Very Large Databases, a scientific conference for researchers in the area of database research.
In 2005 the Association for Computing Machinery appointed Gerhard Weikum a fellow,[1] one of the highest honors of the ACM. Weikum has been honored for his research in the fields of databases and information systems, in particular for his contributions to improve the reliability and the performance of large-scale, distributed information systems.
Since 1993, seven German researchers have been appointed ACM Fellows.