INTERVIEWS

Podcast/Video Interviews by Stephen Ibaraki

Yannis Ioannidis: ACM president (July 2022-June 2024); professor National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, affiliated faculty (President, General Director 2011-2021) "Athena" Research and Innovation Center; coordinator and legal entity head OpenAIRE; software director European Human Brain Project; coordinator EOSC Future strategic project, implementing the core elements European Open Science Cloud; cordinator or a partner in tens of other European and national research and innovation projects; led or is currently leading the creation of new international organizations and spin-off companies; Greek delegate European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Steering Board, Greek delegate European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), ESFRI representative to the e-Infrastructures Reflection Group (e-IRG); serves on the Steering Committee of the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering and the Strategic Advisory Board of the Destination Earth Initiative in Europe; closely involved in the activities of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (UNSDSN), member of the strategic management board of the SDSN Greece regional hub as well as a vice-chair of the new thematic SDSN Global Climate Hub.

This week, Stephen Ibaraki has an exclusive interview with Yannis Ioannidis.

Yannis Ioannidis is a Professor at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (since 1997) as well as an Affiliated Faculty at the "Athena" Research and Innovation Center, the only research and innovation center in Greece focusing exclusively on information technologies and their multidisciplinary applications, where he also served as its President and General Director for 10 years (2011-2021). Prior to returning to Greece, he was a professor at the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for over a decade. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from the University of California-Berkeley, an MSc in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University, and a Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens.

His research interests include Database and Information Systems, Data Science, Data and Text Analytics, Scalable Data Processing, Data Infrastructures and Digital Repositories, Recommender Systems and Personalization, Human-Computer Interaction, and Digital Storytelling, topics on which he has published over 160 articles in leading journals and conferences and also holds three patents. His work is often multidisciplinary, inspired by and applied to data management and analysis problems that arise during societal activities, in industrial environments, or in the context of other scientific fields in the Physical Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities, Life Sciences, and the Arts.

For over a decade, he has been the coordinator and legal entity head of OpenAIRE, which implements the European policies on open access to research publications and data. He is the software director of the European Human Brain Project flagship initiative, which is creating the EBRAINS infrastructure to facilitate breakthrough research in the fields of neuroscience, brain-inspired computing, and brain-related medicine, the coordinator of the EOSC Future strategic project, which implements the core elements of the European Open Science Cloud, and the coordinator or a partner in tens of other European and national research and innovation projects. He has also led or is currently leading the creation of new international organizations and spin-off companies.

He is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a member of Academia Europaea (Informatics Section). He is a recipient of the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award, given by the ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data, the "Xanthopoulos-Pneumatikos" Award for Excellence in Academic Teaching, which is established by FORTH and is presented each year by the President of the Hellenic Republic, the "10-Year Best Paper" Award of the Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) Conference, the "Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching" Award at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the "Presidential Young Investigator" Award (PYI) from the National Science Foundation in the US, and several other research and teaching awards.

He is the newly elected President of ACM (July 2022-June 2024), while in the past he has served the organization as its Secretary / Treasurer, as chair and vice-chair of ACM SIGMOD, a member of the ACM Europe Council, and a member of several other Boards and Committees. He is also the Greek delegate to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Steering Board, the Greek delegate to the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), a member and past vice-chair of the ESFRI Executive Board, and the ESFRI representative to the e-Infrastructures Reflection Group (e-IRG). He currently serves on the Steering Committee of the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering and the Strategic Advisory Board of the Destination Earth Initiative in Europe. Finally, he is closely involved in the activities of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (UNSDSN), which promotes practical solutions for sustainable development, including the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); in particular, he is a member of the strategic management board of the SDSN Greece regional hub as well as a vice-chair of the new thematic SDSN Global Climate Hub.