Marcelo Arenas

Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, Canada. He served as director of Millennium Institute forFoundational Research on Data IMFD) from 2018 to 2023 —he is currently a research associate at the institute— and, prior to that, he was also director of the Semantic Web Research Center (2013–2018), which gave rise to the current IMFD.

He received an IBM Doctoral Fellowship in 2004 and an SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention in 2006 for his doctoral dissertation, “Design Principles for XML Data.” In 2016, he received the Ten-Year Award from the Semantic Web Scientific Association for the article “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 awards for best research paper 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 a Fellow of the same organization for his contributions to the foundations of data management.

He has served on various editorial and program committees and chaired the academic committees for ICDT 2015, ISWC 2015, and PODS 2018. He served as a guest expert on the World Wide Web Consortium’s working group, tasked with standardizing a language for translation from relational databases to RDF databases; the OECD Global Science Forum on digital skills for data-intensive science, and the Committee of Experts that supported the work of the of Chile in drafting a National Artificial Intelligence Policy (2021). 

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