Prof. Volker Markl

Volker Markl is a German computer scientist and full professor leading the Chair of Database Systems and Information Management (DIMA) and co-directing the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD) at TU Berlin. He is also an Associated Professor at the at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Berlin. His research spans distributed systems, scalable data processing, and machine learning, with over 300 published papers, 250 presentations worldwide, and editorial roles at ten academic journals. He earned his PhD in Computer Science in 1999 under Prof. Rudolf Bayer at TU München.

Volker holds numerous distinguished roles, including membership on the Academic Advisory Council to the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) and advisor to the German Federal Government and the European Union on Big Data and AI. Formerly, he was President of the VLDB Endowment and an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto. He has co-chaired the Technological Enablers and Data Science Working Group of ‘Plattform Lernende Systeme,’ sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR).

His achievements have earned him over thirty honors, including election to the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (BBAW). He is an ACM Fellow recognized for contributions to query optimization and scalable data processing, an IEEE Senior Member, and one of Germany’s leading Digital Minds (Digitale Köpfe) by the German Informatics Society. His research has received Best Paper Awards at VLDB, SIGMOD, ICDE, and EDBT, along with two ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Awards.

Volker has a strong record of innovation and technology transfer, holding eighteen patents. His doctoral work produced the UB-Tree indexing technology, earning a European IST Prize. At IBM Almaden, his ideas were incorporated into commercial products, earning an IBM Outstanding Technological Achievement Award. He has also received a Trusted Cloud Award, an IBM Faculty Award, several HP Open Innovation Awards, and a TU Berlin Innovation Supporter Award.

From 2010 to 2019, he led the DFG-funded Stratosphere project, which gave rise to Apache Flink – an open-source stream processing framework with over 47000 community members and 1300 contributors – earning him a Humboldt Innovation Award and the 2023 ACM SIGMOD Systems Award. He has co-founded and advised startups, including Aklamio, dataArtisans, and Parstream, and collaborates with major firms, such as Amazon, Celonis, Databricks, Deutsche Telekom, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Siemens, Snowflake, and Zalando.