Georg Gottlob FRS is an Austrian computer scientist who works in the areas of

database theory Database theory encapsulates a broad range of topics related to the study and research of the theoretical realm of databases and database management systems. Theoretical aspects of data management include, among other areas, the foundations of q ...

logic Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premises ...

, and

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

and is Professor of

Informatics Informatics is the study of computational systems, especially those for data storage and retrieval. According to ACM ''Europe and'' ''Informatics Europe'', informatics is synonymous with computer science and computing as a profession, in which ...

at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

Education

Gottlob obtained his undergraduate and PhD degrees in computer science at

Vienna University of Technology TU Wien (TUW; german: Technische Universität Wien; still known in English as the Vienna University of Technology from 1975–2014) is one of the major universities in Vienna, Austria. The university finds high international and domestic recogn ...

in 1981.

Career and research

Gottlob is currently a chaired professor of computing science at the

Oxford University Department of Computer Science The Department of Computer Science is the computer science department of the University of Oxford, England, which is part of the university's Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division. It was founded in 1957 as the Computing Laboratory. ...

, where he helped establish the information systems research group. He is also a Fellow of

St John's College, Oxford St John's College is a constituent college of the University of Oxford. Founded as a men's college in 1555, it has been coeducational since 1979.Communication from Michael Riordan, college archivist Its founder, Sir Thomas White, intended to pro ...

. Previously, he was a professor of computer science at

, where he still maintains an adjunct position. He was elected a member of the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

in May 2010. He is a founding member of the

Oxford-Man Institute The Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance is an interdisciplinary research institute of the University of Oxford, England. The institute was co-founded in June 2007 with Man Group plc. It brings together faculty, post-docs and students ...

. He has published more than 250 scientific articles in the areas of

computational logic Computational logic is the use of logic to perform or reason about computation. It bears a similar relationship to computer science and engineering as mathematical logic bears to mathematics and as philosophical logic bears to philosophy. It is s ...

, and

, and one textbook on logic programming and databases. In the area of

, he is best known for his influential early work on the complexity of nonmonotonic logics and on (generalised) hypertree decompositions, a framework for obtaining tractable structural classes of

constraint satisfaction In artificial intelligence and operations research, constraint satisfaction is the process of finding a solution through a set of constraints that impose conditions that the variables must satisfy. A solution is therefore a set of values for th ...

problems, and a generalisation of the notion of

tree decomposition In graph theory, a tree decomposition is a mapping of a graph into a tree that can be used to define the treewidth of the graph and speed up solving certain computational problems on the graph. Tree decompositions are also called junction trees ...

from

graph theory In mathematics, graph theory is the study of ''graphs'', which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of '' vertices'' (also called ''nodes'' or ''points'') which are conne ...

. This work has also had substantial impact in database theory, since it is known that the problem of evaluating conjunctive queries on

relational databases A relational database is a (most commonly digital) database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relation ...

is equivalent to the constraint satisfaction problem. His recent work on

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

query language Query languages, data query languages or database query languages (DQL) are computer languages used to make queries in databases and information systems. A well known example is the Structured Query Language (SQL). Types Broadly, query language ...

s (notably

XPath XPath (XML Path Language) is an expression language designed to support the query or transformation of XML documents. It was defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and can be used to compute values (e.g., strings, numbers, or Boolean v ...

) has helped create the complexity-theoretical foundations of this area.

Awards and honours

Gottlob has received numerous awards and honours including election to the

in 2010. His nomination for the

reads: Gottlob has also been designated as an ECCAI fello

in 2002, and received Honorary Degree, honorary doctorates from the

University of Klagenfurt The University of Klagenfurt (german: Universität Klagenfurt or ''Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt'', AAU) is a federal Austrian research university and the largest research and higher education institution in the state of Carinthia. It has it ...

(2016) and the

University of Vienna The University of Vienna (german: Universität Wien) is a public research university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world. With its long and rich histor ...

(2020).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gottlob, Georg Austrian computer scientists Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellows of the Royal Society Database researchers Living people Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holders Members of the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford Members of Academia Europaea 1956 births Scientists from Vienna TU Wien alumni Fellows of St Anne's College, Oxford Fellows of St John's College, Oxford Academics of TU Wien