Peter Buneman is Professor of Database Systems. His work in computer science has focused mainly on databases and programming languages, specifically: active databases, database semantics, approximate information, query languages, types for databases, data integration, bioinformatics and semistructured data – an area in which he has co-authored a book. He has recently worked on issues associated with scientific databases such as data provenance, archiving and annotation. He has served on numerous programme committees, editorial boards and working groups, and has been programme chair for ACM SIGMOD, ACM PODS and ICDT. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a fellow of the ACM and the recipient of a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award.
Before joining the University of Edinburgh, Buneman was a Professor at the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his undergraduate degree from Cambridge University, his graduate degree from the University of Warwick, and he did postdoctoral work at the University of Edinburgh. He has held visiting positions at the University of Glasgow, Imperial College, Kyoto University and INRIA. In addition to computer science he has made contributions to graph theory and to the mathematics of phylogeny. Peter Buneman visited ULB in 2013.

Asim Karim is Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan where he directs the Knowledge and Data Engineering (KADE) Lab. His current research directions include text categorization and clustering, social media analytics, textual semantics, learning under distribution shift, and discrimination-aware data mining. Asim Karim visited ULB in 2013.

Sandra de Amo is Associate Professor at the Departament of Computer Science, Universidade Federal de Uberlândia, Brazil. Her research interests include Data Mining, Query Language with Preference Support, Preference Elicitation and Reasoning, Temporal Databases, Query Languages, Inconsistent Information, Application of Logic to Database Theory. Sandra de Amo visited UFRT in 2013.

Béatrice Bouchou Markhoff teaches XML and Web Technologies for IT4BI. She received her PhD from Université de Franche Comté in 1995. She is associate professor at the Computer Science Dept. of Université François Rabelais Tours. She teaches at undergraduate level (functional programming, IT service management) and postgraduate level (XML data management, knowledge engineering and semantic web). She is the head of the BSc in IT Service Management for Security. Member of LI (Computer Science Research Laboratory of UFRT), her research activities include design of lexical resource management systems, XML data management and Web-ontology-based integration systems. Béatrice Bouchou Markhoff visited Université Gaston Berger de Saint Louis, Sénégal, in 2013.

Adriana Marotta is associate professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of the Republic of Uruguay, where she leads the Information Systems research group. Her research interests include Data Quality, Data Warehousing, Open Data Management, and the combination of these topics. Adriana Marotta visited UFRT in 2014.

Rokia Missaoui is full professor of computer science at Université du Québec en Outaouais, Canada. Her research interests include databases, social network analysis, formal concept analysis, Gallois lattices, data mining, data warehousing. Rokia Missaoui visited UFRT in 2013.

Carlos Ordonez is associate professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Houston, where he leads the active DBMS group. His research spans database systems, data mining, big data analytics and high performance computing. His research at UH has been funded by NSF. Carlos Ordonez visited UFRT in 2013.

Panos Vassiliadis is Professor at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Ioannina since 2002 and a member of the Distributed Management of Data (DMOD) Laboratory. His research has focused on Data Warehouse technology, with particular interest on issues like data warehouse metadata repositories and metadata modeling, data warehouse quality, On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP), and Extraction-Transformation-Loading (ETL). His on-going research is also targeted towards Metadata-Rich Data-Centric Information Systems, with particular emphasis to the modeling, pattern-based design, and evolution of their underlying database infrastructure as well as to Web-Services with particular emphasis to SOA maintenance. Panos Vassiliadis visited UFRT in 2016.

Pedro Furtado is Professor at University of Coimbra UC, Portugal, where he teaches courses in both Computer and Biomedical Engineering. Pedro has more than 25 years experience in both teaching, doing research and supervising industry projects. As part of his work, he has supervised more than 50 Software Engineering projects in different industries, with some emphasis on telecommunications and mobility-related projects. His main research interests are on performance and scalability qualities of systems, and also assistive technologies. Pedro applied these qualities in data warehousing, bigdata, analytics, data mining, cloud, IoT and realtime systems. Concerning assistive technologies, Pedro focuses his group activities on applying mobile and internet-of-things technologies to healthcare scenarios. Pedro has more than 150 papers published in international conferences and journals as well as some books, and several research collaborations with both industry and academia. In the last years, Pedro has spent a lot of time as visiting scholar in some of the most prestigious universities in the world, and collaborating with several non-profit institutions and companies as well. Besides a PhD in Computer Engineering from U. Coimbra (UC) (2000), Pedro Furtado holds an MBA from Universidade Catolica Portuguesa (UCP) (2004). Pedro Furtado visited UFRT in 2016.

Alberto Abelló is a professor at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Polytechnical University of Catalonia). He received his PhD from UPC in 2002. He is also a member of the MPI research group (Grup de recerca en Modelització i Processament de la Informació) at the same university, specializing in software engineering, databases and information systems. His research interests are databases, database design, data warehousing, OLAP tools, ontologies and reasoning. He is the author of articles and papers presented and published in national and international conferences and journals on these subjects (e.g., Information Systems, Data and Knowledge Engineering (DKE), International Journal of Data Warehousing and Mining, Knowledge and Information Systems (KAIS), Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE), International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA), International Conference on Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery (DaWaK) and International Workshop on Data Warehousing and OLAP (DOLAP). He has also served in the program committee of DaWaK and DOLAP, among others. Alberto Abelló visited SAP Germany in 2013.

Diego Calvanese is a professor at the KRDB Research Centre for Knowledge and Data, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy. His research interests include formalisms for knowledge representation and reasoning, ontology languages, description logics, conceptual data modeling, data integration, graph data management, data-aware process verification, and service modeling and synthesis. He is actively involved in several national and international research projects in the above areas, and he is the author of more than 250 refereed publications, including ones in the most prestigious international journals and conferences in Databases and Artificial Intelligence. He is one of the editors of the Description Logic Handbook. In 2012-2013 he has been a visiting researcher at the Technical University of Vienna as Pauli Fellow of the “Wolfgang Pauli Institute”. He is the program chair of PODS 2015. Here is a link to his webpage. Diego Calvanese visited UPC in 2013.

Matteo Golfarelli (Ph.D) is Associate Professor at the University of Bologna teaching Information Systems, Database Systems and Data Mining. He has published over 80 papers in refereed journals and international conferences in the fields of pattern recognition, mobile robotics, multi-agent systems, and business intelligence that is his main research field. His researches in this area covered most of the design issues related to Data Warehouse systems. In particular, he proposed a complete design methodology hinging on a graphical conceptual model, called Dimensional Fact Model. He is co-author of the book Data Warehouse Design: Modern Principles and Methodologies. His current research interests include Social BI and Data Mining applied to Data Warehousing Systems. Here is a link to his webpage. Matteo Golfarelli visited UPC in 2014.

Ralf Kustche holds a position as Academic Director in the “Database and Information Management DIMA” group at TU Berlin. His hot topics in teaching and research are model building and modeling methodology, focusing on “model-based semantic integration of heterogeneous information systems”. Dr. Kutsche has many publications in the foundations and applications of this area, as well as comprehensive experience in national and international project leadership. In the past years, he was (co-)chair of several international conferences/workshops, and invited speaker in conferences, international cooperations and with industry, with a special emphasis on model-based software and data integration. He studied Mathematics at FU Berlin, focusing on Numerical Mathematics, and Computer Science (as a minor at TU Berlin). After the diploma degree he has worked as scientist in Theoretical Computer Science at TU Berlin, and then in applications of formal methods to clinical information systems at German Heart Institute Berlin DHZB, concluding his Ph.D. in this area. As senior scientist from 1994 at TU chair ‘Computation and Information Structures CIS’, he estasblished the focus area ‘Heterogeneous Distributed Information Systems’. At the same time he was scientific coordinator, project leader and member of the board of leaders with the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering ISST. For an intermediate period of more than 30 months from 2005, Dr. Kutsche acted as provisional head of the CIS group. He is advisor of many diploma theses at TU Berlin and (co-)advisor of several Ph.D. dissertations within the Graduate School Distributed Information Systems, at TU Berlin, at Fraunhofer ISST, and at other universities. Presently, he is Science Chair of the BIZWARE initiative, after BIZYCLE a second large-scale project of TU Berlin and industry (SMEs) in the area of model based software and data integration in several business domains, funded by German BMBF. Beside his activities at TU Berlin, again he is engaged in coordination of ‘Modeling’ research at Fraunhofer FIRST, now Fraunhofer FOKUS institute. Ralf Kustche visited UPC in 2013.

Alejandro Vaisman is a professor at the Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires. He has been a professor and chair of the master’s program in data mining at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and professor at Universidad de la República in Uruguay. He received a BE degree in civil engineering, and a BCS degree and a doctorate in computer science from the UBA, under the supervision of Prof. Alberto Mendelzon, from the University of Toronto (UoT). He has been a postdoctoral fellow at UoT, and visiting researcher at UoT, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Universidad de Chile, University of Hasselt, and Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). His research interests are in the field of databases, business intelligence, and geographic information systems. He has authored and coauthored many scientific papers published at major conferences and in major journals. Alejandro Vaisman visited UPC in 2014.

Andritsos Periklis holds an M.Sc. and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the analysis of large repositories and, more specifically, the structure discovery in order to facilitate design and speed up querying. He has developed a clustering algorithm for categorical data, which has also formed the basis of his novel work on discovering alternative schemas in databases with inconsistencies and errors. His techniques have also been used and patented in the industry. In 2008, he co-founded and was the lead research scientist of Thoora.com, a start-up company specializing in collecting and bringing forward the user reaction to current news stories in social media. Thoora received one of the 50 “best start-up” awards in the TechCrunch50 2009 competition. He has held academic positions at the University of Toronto, the University of Trento, Italy and the Free University of Bozen/Bolzano. He is currently a Full Professor at the Department of Information Systems of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. Andritsos Periklis visited TUB in 2013.