SHORT BIO

Dr. Alkis Simitsis is a Research Director at Athena Research Center. In the past, he held various positions with HP/HPE Labs, Micro Focus, Unravel Data, and IBM Research, including Chief Scientist, Systems Architect, and Principal Research Scientist. Alkis brings 20+ years of critical experience in both startup and corporate environments, building innovative information and data management solutions and enterprise-grade products in areas such as scalable big data infrastructure, data-intensive analytics, information management, business intelligence, massively parallel processing, distributed databases, column-store databases, graph databases, security analytics, and cloud computing. Alkis holds 45 U.S. patents, 1 European patent, and has filed 50+ patent applications in the U.S. and worldwide, has published 125+ papers in refereed international journals and conferences (top publications cited 7500+ times, h-index: 45), and frequently serves in various roles in program committees of top-tier international scientific conferences. His most recent service includes General co-chair for VLDB 2027, PC co-chair for EDBT 2025, vice chair for IEEE Big Data 2023, and associate editor for PVLDB 2023/2025/2026, SIGMOD 2026, ACM/IMS J. of Data Science, and Elsevier DKE. Alkis is a recipient of the ACM DOLAP 2023 Test-of-Time Award, several best demo paper awards (IEEE ICDE 2024, EDBT 2024, ACM CIKM 2020, ACM SIGMOD 2014 and 2012) and service awards (PVLDB 2023, IEEE ICDE 2023, EDBT 2023/2024, ACM SIGMOD 2021).