Leading the Way with Computing
We welcomed four new professors in a joint inaugural lecture, shaping the future of research and education in informatics.
On May 23, 2023, TU Wien Informatics welcomed four new professors in the joint inaugural lecture “Leading the way with computing” at Informatik Hörsaal. Dean Gerti Kappel was extending her warmest welcome “to our four new colleagues, that will surely lead the way with computing in their respective fields, be it as researchers or as teachers. They bring with them a wealth of knowledge, passion, and innovative thinking that will undoubtedly enrich our faculty and inspire our students.” In four lighting talks, Maria Christakis, Henderik Proper, Katja Hose and Thomas Lukasiewicz presented their research, joining a panel discussion with Dean Gerti Kappel on how informatics research and teaching can tackle new challenges.
Maria Christakis, born in Greece, is leading the Research Unit for Software Engineering as a Full Professor for Software Engineering. Her techniques and tools explore novel ways of writing, specifying, analyzing, testing, and debugging programs in order to make them more robust while improving the developer experience. Before joining TU Wien, she was doing research at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany, the University of Kent in England, Microsoft Research in the US, and ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Since 2022, Maria was awarded an ERC Starting grant, a WWTF ICT grant as well as a Google Research Scholar award. If you want to know more about Maria, check out her #5QW Interview.
Henderik A. Proper, Erik for friends, is from the Netherlands and joined the Research Unit for Business Informatics as a Full Professor in Enterprise and Process Engineering. He has a mixed background, covering a variety of roles in both academia and industry, which is closely linked to his research field: domain modeling. Over the past 20 years, he has applied this research drive and general research in the context of enterprise design management. Erik is also a co-initiator of the ArchiMate research project, which also resulted in the ArchiMate standard for enterprise architecture modeling. Presently, he is also the vice-chair of the IFIP 8.1 working group on information systems, while also being the representative for the Netherlands in IFIP’s TC8 technical committee. Furthermore, he is the Stellvertretender Sprecher (vice chair) of the working group on enterprise modeling and information systems architectures (EMISA) of the German Computer Science Society (Gesellschaft für Informatik).Find out more about Erik and check out his #5QW Interview.
Katja Hose is born in Germany and is now part of the Research Unit for Databases and AI as a Full Professor of Data Management. Her research is situated at the confluence of data management, knowledge engineering, and machine learning. It is spanning theory, algorithms, and applications of Data Science including graph databases, knowledge graphs, query optimization, analytics, and machine learning. She is also engaging in interdisciplinary data science, in collaboration with colleagues from bioscience, medicine, and environmental assessment. As a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Aalborg University, she has been leading the Data, Knowledge, and Web Engineering group. Prior to joining Aalborg University, she was a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany, and received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Ilmenau University of Technology, Germany. Get to know Katja and check out her #5QW Interview.
Thomas Lukasiewicz is leading the Research Unit for Artificial Intelligence Techniques as a Full Professor for Artificial Intelligence Techniques since April 2022. He holds an AXA Chair on “Explainable Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare” since 2019. Before moving to TU Wien Informatics, he was a Professor of Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, UK, since 2010, heading the Intelligent Systems Lab within the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Theme. Thomas Lukasiewicz is a Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA) since 2022 and a Fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI; formerly ECCAI) since 2020. He received the KR 2022 Test-of-Time Award, the 2019 ACM PODS Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award, the RuleML 2015 Best Paper Award, the AIJ Prominent Paper Award 2013, and the IJCAI-01 Distinguished Paper Award. He is or has been a PC area chair, senior PC member, or PC member for more than 200 conferences and workshops (more than 20 of which co-chaired). He is also an area editor for ACM TOCL and has recently been an associate editor for JAIR and AIJ.
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