Jorge-Arnulfo Quiané-Ruiz
It is with deep sadness and regret that we must acknowledge the sudden death of our former colleague and friend Jorge-Arnulfo Quiané-Ruiz. He is and will forever be sorely missed. Our thoughts and prayers are with his wife Zoi Kaoudi, his four children, and his loved ones.
From November 2019 to December 2022, Jorge was Project Leader of the Research Project Agora in the Chair of Database Systems and Information Management (DIMA) led by Prof. Dr. Volker Markl at the Technische Universität Berlin. In 2020, he was appointed a Junior Research Group Leader in the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD). It is with great appreciation that we honor and remember Jorge as an outstanding team member and an excellent scientist, who always displayed great enthusiasm, optimism, and drive. He was consistently cheerful, warm, open-minded, and was always willing to help others.
From 2004 through 2008, Jorge conducted research in distributed query processing as a doctoral student in Inria (France) and earned his PhD in Computer Science in 2008 from Nantes Université. Over the following fifteen years, he joined Inria as a Research Engineer, the Universität des Saarlandes as a Postdoctoral Researcher, Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) as a Senior Researcher, the DIMA Group at TU Berlin as a Principal Researcher, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) as a Scientific Advisor, and BIFOLD as Head of the Big Data Systems Group. In January 2023, both he and his wife Zoi Kaoudi were appointed Associate Professors in the Department of Computer Science (Data-intensive Systems and Applications - DASYA Research Group) at the IT University of Copenhagen (ITU) in Denmark.
Over the years, Jorge has received multiple awards for research on cross-platform computing and scalable infrastructures. Among them the 2022 ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award, the ICDE 2022 Best Demo Award, and the ICDE 2021 Best Paper Award, as well as several patents in core database areas and machine learning. Furthermore, he led and managed the Rheem Project on Big Data Management, now incubating in the Apache Software Foundation as Apache Wayang, and the Agora Project, which aims to create a data ecosystem for cross-platform computing. Moreover, he was a co-founder and CTO of databloom.ai, a startup company.