Work at the Database Research Group (DBS) of ETH Zurich is focused on realizing the hyperdatabase infrastructure vision that combines and generalizes database technology with elements from the grid infrastructure and includes peer-to-peer data management. This infrastructure provides well- established database mechanisms at the level of services in a highly distributed, mobile, and autonomous network of information providers and consumers, the "information space" as it occurs in next generation digital libraries. Within this vision, we follow four main research directions:
1) transactional coordination of composite systems
2) parallelization through the deployment of clusters of databases,
3) information dynamics and mobility, and
4) multimedia information management and efficient search techniques. Apart of theoretical investigations within these directions, the DBS group has a strong tradition in developing prototype systems that demonstrate the usefulness and efficiency of the proposed methods.
Advanced Lab facilities, including:
Database Cluster consisting of up to 128 nodes, Relevant database and middleware software products, Large image database (>350000) for image search/retrieval by content.
OSIRIS/ISIS prototype system as hyperdatabase infrastructure (OSIRIS) and for search (ISIS) ETHWorld, ETH’s virtual campus
Yannis Ioannidis is currently a Professor at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Athens. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1986. He joined the faculty of the Computer Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1986, where he became a Professor before leaving in 1999.
His research interests include database and information systems, scientific systems, digital libraries and human-computer interaction, topics on which he has published over 50 articles in leading journals and conferences and holds two patents.
Dr. Ioannidis was the recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator (PYI) award in 1991, awarded by the President of the United States to the top young scientists in each field. He is also the recipient of the "10-Year Best Paper Award" in the 2003 VLDB Conference, given for the most influential paper in the proceedings of the conference 10 years earlier.
He spoke on "Next-Generation Experiment Management" as the keynote speaker in the Conference on Statistical and Scientific Databases (July 2000), and on "Databases and the Web" as the keynote speaker in the Worksop on Parallel and Distributed Processing (January 2000) and the Conference on Web Age Information Management (July 2001).