Volker Markl Explained

Volker Markl
Doctoral Advisor:	Rudolf Bayer

Volker Markl (born 1971) is a German computer scientist and database systems researcher.

Career

In 1999, Markl received his PhD in computer science under the direction of Rudolf Bayer at the Technical University of Munich. His doctoral research led to the development of the UB-Tree.^[1] From 1997 to 2000, he was research group leader at FORWISS, the Bavarian research center for knowledge-based systems. From 2001 to 2008, he was project leader at the IBM Almaden Research Center, Silicon Valley. Since 2008, he has been full professor and Chair of the Database Systems and Information Management Group at Technische Universität Berlin.^[2] Since 2014, he is head of the Intelligent Analytics for Massive Data Research Department at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Berlin.^[3] From 2014 to 2020, he was director of the Berlin Big Data Center (BBDC). From 2018 to 2020, he was co-director of the Berlin Machine Learning Center (BZML). Together with Klaus-Robert Müller he became director of the new Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD), after both BBDC and the BZML merged into BIFOLD in 2020.^[4]

From 2010 through 2019, he led the DFG funded Stratosphere project, which led to the establishment of Apache Flink.^[5] In 2018, he was elected president of the VLDB Endowment.^[6]

Research

Markl’s research interests lie at the intersection of distributed systems, scalable data processing, and machine learning.

Awards and honors

Markl was elected member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2021.^[7]

His work was honoured with several awards, including:

• 2021 ICDE Best Paper Award^[8]
• 2021 BTW Best Paper Award^[9]
• 2020 ACM SIGMOD Best Paper Award^[10]
• 2020 ACM Fellow^[11]
• 2019 EDBT Best Paper Award^[12]
• 2017 BTW Best Paper Award
• 2017 EDBT Best Demonstration Award^[13]
• 2016 ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award
• 2014 VLDB Best Paper Award^[14]
• 2012 IBM Faculty Award
• 2012 IBM Shared University Research Grant^[15]
• 2010 Hewlett Packard Open Innovation Award^[16]
• 2005 IBM Outstanding Technological Achievement Award
• 2005 IBM Pat Goldberg Best Paper Award^[17]

Notes and References

1. Book: MISTRAL: processing relational queries using a multidimensional access technique . Dissertationen zu Datenbanken und Informationssystemen . 1999 . Sankt Augustin: Infix . 9783896014597 . 2021-11-30.
2. Web site: Volker Markl . TU Berlin . 2021-11-30.
3. Web site: Volker Markl . German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) . 2021-11-30.
4. Web site: Volker Markl . Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD) . 2021-11-30.
5. Web site: Stratosphere - Information Management above the Clouds . German Research Foundation (DFG) . 2021-11-30.
6. Web site: Board of Trustees . VLDB Endowment . 2021-12-02.
7. Web site: Volker Markl . Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities . 2022-03-03.
8. Web site: ICDE 2021 Best Paper Award . ICDE . 2021-11-30.
9. Web site: BTW Best Paper Awards . 2022-05-26.
10. Web site: SIGMOD Best Paper Award . ACM SIGMOD . 2021-11-30.
11. Web site: Volker Markl . ACM . 2021-11-30.
12. Web site: EDBT 2019 Best Paper Award . EDBT . 2021-11-30.
13. Web site: EDBT 2017 Best Paper Award . EDBT . 2021-11-30.
14. Web site: Best Paper Awards . VLDB . 2021-11-30.
15. Web site: IBM-Preis für Prof. Dr. Volker Markl . Informationsdienst Wissenschaft . de . 2021-11-30.
16. Web site: HP Announces Recipients of Third Annual Innovation Research Awards . Hewlett Packard . 2021-11-30.
17. Web site: Pat Goldberg Memorial Best Paper Awards . 9 February 2021 . IBM . 2021-11-30.