Prof. Yannis Ioannidis is currently a Professor at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Athens, as well as President and General Director of the "Athena" Research Center. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1986. Immediately after that he joined the faculty of the Computer Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he became a Professor. His research interests include database and information systems, digital libraries, scientific systems, and humancomputer interaction, topics on which he has published over sixty articles in leading journals and conferences and holds three patents. Dr. Ioannidis currently serves for a 4 year term as the ACM SIGMOD chair (following a 4-year term as vice chair). He is an ACM and IEEE Fellow, has received the Presidential Young Investigator Award (PYI) in the US, the VLDB 10-Year Best Paper Award, and several teaching awards. He has served on the review or scientific boards of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories in Berkeley, and the (now defunct) CESDIS Center for Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences, the Greek Minister of Health, and others. His research has been funded in over thirty research projects by various government agencies (USA, Europe, and Greece) or private industry.