Rate My Professor Erhard Rahm

Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Erhard Rahm is Professor Emeritus of Databases at the Institute of Computer Science, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Universität Leipzig, where he has served as full professor since December 1994 and led the Database Group Leipzig. He earned his Diplom in Computer Science from the University of Kaiserslautern in 1984, Dr.-Ing. in 1988 for his dissertation on concurrency and coherency control in shared disk database management systems, and habilitation in 1993 on architectures of high-performance transaction systems. His career began as a research associate at Kaiserslautern from 1984 to 1988, followed by a visiting scientist position at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center from 1988 to 1989, and assistant professor at Kaiserslautern from 1989 to 1994. At Leipzig, Rahm chaired the Computer Science Department and served as vice-dean from 1996 to 1999, directed the Web Data Integration Lab since 2010, and co-directed the national Data Science Center ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig since October 2014. He also held roles such as program director for the Master in Data Science, Erasmus coordinator, and chair of the Computer Science examination board from 2005 to 2013.

Rahm's research centers on data integration techniques, including schema matching, entity resolution, record linkage, data cleaning, big data integration, knowledge graph construction, privacy-preserving data analysis, scalable graph data management, and analytics. Among his most influential publications are "A survey of approaches to automatic schema matching" (2001, VLDB Journal), "Data cleaning: Problems and current approaches" (2000), "Similarity flooding: A versatile graph matching algorithm and its application to schema matching" (2002, recipient of ICDE 2013 Influential Paper Award), "Generic schema matching with Cupid" (2001), and "COMA: a system for flexible combination of schema matching approaches" (2002). He received the VLDB 2011 Ten-Year Best Paper Award, Microsoft Research Outstanding Collaborator Award in 2016 for collaborations defining schema matching in data exchange, and best paper awards at ICDE 2002, ESWC 2013 and 2018, among others. Rahm served as editor-in-chief of VLDB Journal (2003-2009), Parallel Computing (2001-2007), and Datenbank-Spektrum (until 2011). He held leadership positions in conferences such as general chair of BTW 2003, PC vice-chair of ICDE 2021, and numerous program committees for VLDB, SIGMOD, EDBT. Since 2022, he is vice-president of the German Informatics Society (GI).