<p>Gerhard Weikum is a Scientific Director at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbruecken,  Germany, and also an Adjunct Professor at Saarland University. He graduated from the University of Darmstadt, Germany. Weikum's research spans  transactional and distributed systems, self-tuning database systems, DB&IR integration, and automatic knowledge harvesting from Web and text sources. He co-authored a comprehensive textbook on transactional systems, received the VLDB Test-of-Time Award for his work on automatic DB tuning, and is one of the creators of the YAGO knowledge base. Weikum is an ACM Fellow, a Fellow of the German Computer Society, and a member of the German Academy of Science and Engineering and the Academia Europaea. He has served on various editorial boards, including ACM TODS, ACM TWEB, and Communications of the ACM, and as program committee chair of conferences like ACM SIGMOD, Data Engineering, and CIDR. From 2003 through 2009 he was president of the VLDB Endowment. He currently serves on Germany's Council of Science and Humanities. Weikum received a Google Focused Research Award in 2010, and is the recipient of the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award 2011.</p>