Aris Gkoulalas-Divanis is a research scientist in the Smarter Cities Technology Centre of IBM Research-Ireland, leading the data privacy research direction of the lab. In this position, he has received two Invention Achievement Awards (Plateaus) from IBM and has been recognized in the 2014 Manager’s Choice Award. Before joining IBM Research-Ireland in 2012, Aris worked for two years in the Information Analytics group of IBM Research in Zurich, conducting research in the areas of data mining and machine learning. In 2011, he was nominated as a member of the IBM Business and Technical Leadership Resources program, and in 2012 he served as the Global Technology Outlook advocate for IBM Ireland. Since 2012, he has served as the Security & Privacy PIC Co-Chair of IBM Research worldwide.

Aris holds a diploma degree in computer science from the University of Ioannina (2003), an MS degree from the Computer Engineering Department of the University of Minnesota (2005), and a PhD (with honors) from the Department of Computer & Communication Engineering of the University of Thessaly (2009). His PhD dissertation was awarded the prestigious Certificate of Recognition and Honorable Mention in 2009 by ACM SIGKDD. From March 2009 until February 2010, he was appointed as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University, working on privacy for medical data sharing. Before that, he served as a full-time research assistant at both the University of Minnesota and the University of Manchester.

Aris’ research interests are in the areas of databases, data mining, privacy-preserving data mining, privacy and anonymity in trajectories and location-based services, privacy in medical data sharing, and knowledge hiding. In these areas, he has given many seminars and two tutorials (ECML PKDD 2011, SDM 2012), published more than 70 research works including three Springer books, and authored ten patents. His recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences proposed the first approach for anonymizing medical data in a way that they remain useful for validating genome-wide association studies, and was reported as being among important advances in the last ten years of genomic research. Aris is a professional member of ACM, IEEE, and SIAM, and an at-large member of UPE and Sigma Xi.

Aris is a regular reviewer for top-ranked journals, such as ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Elsevier’s Information Systems, Springer’s Knowledge and Information Systems, and Springer’s Distributed and Parallel Databases. He also regularly serves on the program committees of prestigious conferences, such as ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, and IEEE International Conference on Big Data.

In addition to his role as a category editor for ACM Computing Reviews, Aris is an editor for IGI’s International Journal of Knowledge-Based Organizations. From January to August 2009 he also served as an associate and contributing editor for ACM Crossroads.