Volker Markl is a Full Professor and Chair of the Database Systems and Information Management (DIMA) Group at the Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin). At the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), he is Chief Scientist and Head of the Intelligent Analytics for Massive Data Research Group. In addition, he is Director of the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learnig and Data (BIFOLD), a merger of the Berlin Big Data Center (BBDC) and the Berlin Center for Machine Learning (BZML). BIFOLD is one of Germany’s national Competence Centers for Artificial Intelligence and will further bolster ongoing collaborative research in scalable data management and Machine Learning. Dr. Markl is a database systems researcher conducting research at the intersection of of distributed systems, scalable data processing, text mining, computer networks, machine learning, and applications in healthcare, logistics, Industry 4.0, and information marketplaces. Earlier in his career, he was a Research Staff Member and Project Leader at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, USA and a Research Group Leader at FORWISS, the Bavarian Research Center for Knowledge-based Systems located in Munich, Germany. Volker Markl is a computer science graduate from Technische Universität München, where he earned his Diploma in 1995 with a thesis on exception handling in programming languages. He earned his PhD in 1999 the area of multidimensional indexing under the supervision of Rudolf Bayer.
Volker Markl has published numerous scholarly papers on indexing, query optimization, lightweight information integration, and scalable data processing at prestigious venues. He holds 18 patents, has transferred technology into several commercial products, and has been involved in two successful startup exits. He has been both the Speaker and Principal Investigator for the Stratosphere Project, which resulted in a Humboldt Innovation Award as well as Apache Flink, the open-source big data analytics system. He currently serves as the President of the VLDB Endowment and was elected as one of Germany’s leading Digital Minds (Digitale Köpfe) by the German Informatics (GI) Society. Volker also is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Software AG. Most recently, Volker and his team earned the ACM SIGMOD 2020 Best Paper Award, for their work on „ Pump Up the Volume: Processing Large Data on GPUs with Fast Interconnects “.