Prof. Gerhard Weikum (MPII, Saarbruecken, Germany) has agreed to give a keynote speech at the Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop which takes place on 2 and 3 February 2009 at the University of Twente.
Gerhard Weikum is Research Director at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics (MPII) in Saarbruecken, Germany, where he is leading the department on databases and information systems. Prof. Weikum is ACM fellow and a renowned expert in the field of Databases. He received the VLDB 10-Year Achievement Award in 2002. Since then, he focused on several information retrieval problems such as peer-to-peer search, search efficiency, and database and search integration, resulting in for instance 6 full papers at the last SIGIR conferences.