Marcelo Arenas

Full Professor at the Department of Computer Science of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, Canada. He was director of the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data (IMFD) between 2018 and 2023 —today he is an associate researcher at the institute— and, previously, he was also director of the Center for Semantic Web Research (2013-2018), which gave rise to the current IMFD.

He received an IBM Doctoral Fellowship in 2004 and a SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention in 2006 for his doctoral thesis “Design Principles for XML Data“. In 2016 he received the Ten-Year Award from the Semantic Web Science Association for the paper “Semantics and Complexity of SPARQL”, and in 2020 the ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award for the paper “Efficient Logspace Classes for Enumeration, Counting, and Uniform Generation”.

He has received nine best research paper awards at the PODS 2003, PODS 2005, ISWC 2006, ICDT 2010, ESWC 2011, PODS 2011, WWW 2012, ISWC 2014, and PODS 2019 conferences. In 2021 he was named a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and in 2024 he was elected Fellow of the same organization for his contributions to the foundations of data management.

He has been part of various editorial and program committees, and chaired the academic committees of ICDT 2015, ISWC 2015, and PODS 2018. He took part as an invited expert on the World Wide Web Consortium working group tasked with standardizing a language for translating relational databases into RDF databases; on the OECD Global Science Forum on digital skills for data-intensive science, and on the Committee of Experts that supported the work of the Chilean government in drafting a National Artificial Intelligence Policy (2021).

His research areas are data management, applications of logic in computer science, knowledge representation, and explainable artificial intelligence