Volker Markl (volker.markl@tu-berlin.de) is a Full Professor and Chair of the DIMA Group and Speaker for the Data Analytics Lab (www.analytics.tu-berlin.de) at TUB as well as director of the Berlin Big Data Center (http://bbdc.berlin). In addition, he is the Speaker of a German National Science Foundation (DFG) funded Research Unit called Stratosphere, which continues to (further) develop a next-generation big data analytics platform. Earlier this year, under his leadership, a study on big data challenges and opportunities was conducted for the German Federal Ministry of Economics & Technology (BMWi). To date, he has given over 200 invited talks and published over 80 research papers at world-class scientific venues. His research interests include new hardware architectures for information management, scalable processing and optimization of data programming languages, information processing, and information modeling.

Asterios Katsifodimos (asterios.katsifodimos@tu-berlin.de) is a Postdoctoral Researcher working on the Stratosphere Research Project (getstratosphere.org) in the Database Systems and Information Management (DIMA) Group at the Technische Universität Berlin (TUB). He received his PhD in 2013 from INRIA Saclay and Université Paris-Sud under the supervision of Ioana Manolescu. His PhD thesis focused on materialized view-based techniques for the management of web data. He was a member of the High Performance Computing Lab at the University of Cyprus, where he obtained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees. His research interests include query optimization, large-scale distributed data management, and big data analytics.

Tilmann Rabl is a senior researcher who will join the DIMA Group in August and will be research coordinator of the Berlin Big Data Center (http://bbdc.berlin). Furthermore, he is chair of the SPEC Research Group on Big Data, Professional Affiliate of the Transaction Processing Performance Council, and member of the Board of Directors of the BigData Top100 Initiative.