Georg Gottlob

Georg Gottlob is a Full Professor of Computer Science at the University of Calabria (UniCal) since the beginning of 2024. Gottlob was born in Vienna, where he studied mathematics, logic, and computer science at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), graduating in computer engineering in 1979 and obtaining his Ph.D. in 1981.

From 2006 to 2023, he held the position of Statutory Professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, where he is now a Professor Emeritus and a member of St John’s College and an Honorary Fellow of St Anne’s College. From 1988 to 2005, he was a Full Professor at the Vienna University of Technology. In the years 1985-1988, he worked at the Institute for Applied Mathematics of the National Research Council (CNR) in Genoa and in 1982-1984 at the Polytechnic University of Milan. In the summer quarters of 1985-87, he was a Research Fellow and Lecturer at Stanford, and in 1999, he was a McKay Visiting Professor at Berkeley.

His interests span various aspects of artificial intelligence, databases, and computational logic. He is particularly interested in knowledge representation and automated reasoning, logic and complexity, as well as database querying languages and algorithms, knowledge graphs, and web-based information systems. His most recent research theme is the development of prompt engineering methods to extract reliable information from large language models (LLMs) and to automatically generate, correct, and complete databases through LLMs.

Gottlob has published in top computer science journals and has received various awards, including the Wittgenstein Award (Austria) and the Ada Lovelace Medal (UK), and, along with his co-authors, the Alonzo Church Award. He is a member of the Royal Society, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the German National Academy of Sciences “Leopoldina,” and the Academia Europaea. Gottlob served as the program chair of the IJCAI 2003 conference, the most important international conference on artificial intelligence, and of PODS 2000, the top conference on database theory.

He was one of the founders of Lixto, a company specializing in semi-automatic web data extraction, acquired by McKinsey in 2013. Gottlob obtained an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant for the “DIADEM: Domain-Centered Intelligent Automated Data Extraction Methodology” project. Based on the results of this project, he co-founded Wrapidity Ltd, a company specializing in fully automatic web data extraction, acquired in 2016 by Meltwater. He was also a co-founder of DLVSystem s.r.l. and DeepReason.AI Ltd, recently acquired by Meltwater.

Currently, Gottlob is researching how to obtain precise data from ChatGPT or other LLMs through an automatic process of intelligent prompting of LLMs. He is developing the Chat2Data system, which can automatically correct and enrich existing databases or build new databases from scratch using intelligent LLM querying.