Gerhard Weikum is a Research Director at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany, where he is leading the databases and information systems department. His current research interests include transactional and distributed systems, self-tuning database systems, data and text integration, and the automatic construction of knowledge bases. He is one of the creators of the YAGO knowledge base. He is also the Dean of the International Max Planck Research School for Computer Science (IMPRS-CS). Earlier he held positions at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, at MCC in Austin, Texas, and he was a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington. He received his diploma and doctoral degrees from the TU Darmstadt, Germany. He acted as the President of the VLDB endowment in 2005 and 2006. The endowment organizes the yearly International Conference on Very Large Databases, a scientific conference for researchers i