Peter Boncz of Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam has been appointed Special Professor of Large-Scale Analytical Data Management at the Faculty of Sciences of VU University Amsterdam as of 1 October 2013.
It concerns a part-time appointment for one day per week. The rest of the week he will remain affiliated to CWI. The position is a cooperation between VU University and CWI.
As endowed professor Boncz will investigate efficient data analysis techniques that anticipate on the power of modern hardware. His area of application will be graph-like data files, such as connections in social networks. Analyzing these connectivity patterns can give valuable new insights in this data.
"Analyzing and enriching data is increasingly adopted by industry", Boncz says. "A data economy is rising in which value is added by refining data and extracting knowledge from it. Besides applications such as marketing and fraud detection, data analysis also plays a crucial role in cost management and data-driven research. I think the most facinating aspect of this research is the combination of scientific challenges and innovative applications."
Peter Boncz was previously involved at CWI in the foundation of the spin-off companies Data Distilleries and Vectorwise. In 2006 he won the ICT Regie Award for these activities. His thesis on column-based database management systems was awarded with the VLCB "10 Year Best Paper Award" in 2009. Previously this year he recieved the prestigious Humboldt Research Award for his contributions to science.
