MTSR 2024

18^th International Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research

Athens, 20 - 22 November 2024

Keynote Speaker

We are honored to introduce our keynote speaker

Timos Sellis, Director, Archimedes Research Unit on AI, Data Science and Algorithms, "Athena" Research Center, Athens, Greece

Keynote Presentation title:
Data curation for Intelligent, Reliable and Responsible decision-making systems

Abstract

In this talk we will focus on how data management practices need to be re-configured in order to support Intelligent, Reliable and Responsible decision-making systems. The appetite for effective use of information assets has been steadily rising in both public and private sector organisations. However, whether the information is used for social good or commercial gain, there is a growing recognition of the complex socio-technical challenges associated with balancing the diverse demands of regulatory compliance and data privacy, social expectations and ethical use, business process agility and value creation, and scarcity of data science talent. In this talk, we highlight these interconnected challenges and introduce Information Resilience, as a scaffold within which the competing requirements of responsible and agile approaches to information use can be positioned. The aim is to develop and present a manifesto for Information Resilience that can serve as a reference for future research and development in relevant areas of Responsible Data Management.

Biography

Timos Sellis is the Director of the "Archimedes" Research Unit of the "Athena" Research Center. Most recently he was a Facebook Researcher (USA, 2020-22), and Professor and Director of the Data Science Research Institute at Swinburne University of Technology (Australia, 2016-20). He was previously a faculty member at the University of Maryland (USA, 1986-92), at the National Technical University of Athens (Greece, 1992-2013) and at RMIT University (Australia, 2013-2016), while he was also the Director of the Information Systems Institute of the Research Center at "Athena" Research Center (2007-13). His research interests include data management, streaming data, graph data management, and spatio- temporal database systems.

Timos is a recipient of the prestigious Presidential Young Investigator (PYI) award given by the President of USA to the most talented new researchers (1990), and of the VLDB 1997 10 Year Paper Award in 1997 (awarded to the paper published in the proceedings of the VLDB 1987 conference that had the biggest impact in the field of database systems in the decade 1987-97). He was the president of the National Council for Research and Technology of Greece (2001-2003). In November 2009, he was awarded the status of IEEE Fellow, for his contributions to database query optimization, and spatial data management, and in November 2013 the status of ACM Fellow, for his contributions to database query optimization, spatial data management, and data warehousing. In March 2018 he received the IEEE TCDE Impact Award, for contributions to database systems research and broadening the reach of data engineering research.