Professor Johann-Christoph Freytag, Ph.D. from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin has been selected to participate in the prestigious HP Labs Innovation Research Program. The program is designed to provide colleges, universities and research institutes around the world with opportunities to conduct breakthrough collaborative research with HP.

Professor Freytag will collaborate with HP Labs on a research initiative focused on database systems running in a CLOUD computing environment. In particular, Freytag’s work focuses on adaptive query processing for complex, long running database queries.

“The HP Labs Innovation Research Program helped me in the past year to accelerate my research in adaptive query processing – getting funding for another year give me the opportunity to continue my close cooperation with outstanding researchers at HP”, says Freytag who collaborates with partners from the Technische Universität Berlin and the Hasso Plattner Institut (HPI) in Potsdam on developing new database technology based on the Cloud computing paradigm.

HP reviewed more than 375 proposals from 202 universities across 36 countries. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin is one of only 52 universities in the world to receive a 2010 Innovation Research award. The HP Labs Innovation Research Program is designed to encourage open collaboration between HP and the academic community on mutually beneficial, high-impact research. This year's proposals were solicited on a range of topics within the eight broad research themes at HP Labs – analytics, cloud, content transformation, digital commercial print, immersive interaction, information management, intelligent infrastructure and sustainability.

"Our goal with the HP Labs Innovation Research Program is to inspire the brightest minds from around the world to conduct high-impact scientific research, addressing the most important challenges and opportunities facing society in the next decade," said Prith Banerjee, senior vice president of research at HP and director of HP Labs. “The Database System Research Group (DBIS) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin has demonstrated outstanding achievement and we look forward to collaborating with it in this dynamic area of research.”

Johann-Christoph Freytag, Ph.D. is a Full Professor and Chair of the Database and Information System (DBIS) group at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Before becoming a professor, Dr. Freytag spent nine years in industrial research at the IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA, at the European Computer Industry Research Centre (ECRC), Munich, and at DEC’s (Digital Equipment) Database System Research Center, Munich. His research has spanned many different areas: query processing in object relational database systems, information integration, data and information quality, privacy and database systems, information as a service, and new hardware architectures for information management. Dr. Freytag has authored and published several books, journal papers, and more than 50 research papers published and high quality conferences. For the past 25 years he presented over 300 invited talks at universities, industrial research laboratories and industrial consortia. In 2003 he organized the prestigious VLDB (Very Large Database) conference in Berlin with over 700 participants from around the globe.


“For the university it is always a great honour when our scientists receive such distinguished award. It demonstrates how Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin successfully manages to unite the world’s leading scientists under one roof. Together with Professor Freytag, we are most delighted about the international recognition of his scientific work”, Mirja Behrendt, presidential press spokeswoman, declared.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Mirja Behrendt
Press Spokeswoman
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Unter den Linden 6
10099 Berlin
Phone: +49 30 2093-2090
Email: mirja.behrendt@uv.hu-berlin.de