I’m a researcher in Computer Science at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, in Germany, and an assistant professor (under absence of leave) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. Before that I was a postdoc at the Vrjie Universiteit (where I also obtained my PhD), and a visiting scholar at Stanford University.

My research focuses on how to process efficiently very large amounts of data using parallel and/or distributed architectures. In this context, I’m particularly interested in computation that extracts new (and interesting) knowledge from the Web or from other very large datasets. If you are interested, please check out my publication list to have a better idea of my research area.

I received a number of awards for my research, and I’m very honored for that. A few papers that I co-authored have received either a honorable mention or a best paper award at top conferences. In 2010, my work on forward inference with MapReduce has won the IEEE SCALE challenge. In 2012, the Network Institute awarded me the prize “Most Promising Young Researcher Award”. In 2013, my PhD was awarded with the qualification cum laude, which was given only to 5% of the theses in our department. In 2014, my PhD work received an honourable mention as best PhD thesis in Computer Science in the country. The award was given by the Christiaan Huygens society, after a selection performed by KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences).