The University of Vienna has awarded three honorary doctorates to highly deserving scientists: The internationally renowned computer scientist Professor Georg Gottlob from our research unit Databases and Artificial Intelligence was awarded an honorary doctorate by Rector Heinz W. Engl on Friday, September 18, 2020, in the grand ballroom of the University of Vienna together with the lawyers Andrea Büchler (University of Zurich) and Ute Sacksofsky (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main).

Stations of Science

Georg Gottlob got his Engineer and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from TU Wien in 1979 and 1981, respectively. After positions in Milan, Genoa, and Stanford, he was appointed a full professor of Informatics to the TU Wien in 1988. In 2006 he followed a call to Oxford University but remained loyal to TU Wien Informatics as an Adjunct Professor in Logic and Computation and Informations System Engineering. From 2006 to 2011, he held the Chair of Computing Science at Oxford University. He then moved to the Chair of Informatics at Oxford, which he had since January 2012. Georg Gottlob is a Professorial Fellow of St John’s College.

Georg’s current research interests are theoretical and practical aspects of web data extraction, constraint satisfaction, computational logic, databases, database theory, query languages, complexity theory, knowledge representation and reasoning, artificial intelligence, logic programming, and finite model theory.

For his research work, he received the Wittgenstein Award of the FWF, the ERC Advanced Investigators Grant, and the Ada Lovelace Medal of the British Computer Society. He is an ACM Fellow, an ECCAI Fellow, Fellow of the Royal Society, and a member of the Austrian, German, and European Academies of Sciences. In various advisory boards, Georg Gottlob strives to support excellent research. His function as Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of the University of Vienna, which he held with outstanding commitment from 2014 to 2019, deserves special mention. He is a member of the editorial boards of several journals, e.g., JCSS and CACM.

Among some other company foundations, he co-founded DeepReason.ai in 2018, a company providing software and services for reasoning on Big Data, and for building and maintaining enterprise knowledge graphs.

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