Yannis Ioannidis speaks out on database research funding in Europe, the importance of being uncertain, teaching as show business, the history of histograms, and more

ABSTRACT

Welcome to this installment of ACM SIGMOD Record's series of interviews with distinguished members of the database community. I'm Marianne Winslett, and today we are at the SIGMOD 2006 conference in Chicago. I have here with me Yannis Ioannidis, who is a professor of informatics and telecommunication at the University of Athens. Before that, he was a professor for many years at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Yannis's research focuses on query optimization, digital libraries, and management of scientific data. Yannis is an ACM Fellow, has won numerous teaching awards, and received the VLDB 10 Year Best Paper Award. He is the Vice-Chair of SIGMOD, and his PhD is from the University of California at Berkeley. So, Yannis, welcome!