In May 2024, a celebration event was held to mark Prof. Dr. Erhard Rahm’s 30 years as Professor of Databases, his 10 years as head of the Data Science and AI Center ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig at Leipzig University and his 65th birthday.

His achievements were honored by the Rector of Leipzig University, Prof. Dr. Eva Inés Obergfell and the President of the German Society for Computer Science, Christine Regitz, as well as by the database colleagues Prof. Volker Markl (TU Berlin) and Dr. Phil Bernstein (Microsoft Research) as well as by ScaDS.AI colleague and director Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Nagel (TU Dresden).

Prof. Rahm gave an overview of his 30 years in Leipzig, from the establishment of computer science in the 1990s in his function as Director of the Institute of Computer Science to the acquisition and successive expansion of the ScaDS.AI Center as one of the now institutionalized German AI centers of excellence.

Research highlights were mentioned such as his impactful work on schema matching, entity resolution and graph analytics leading to recognitions such as the VLDB ten year best paper and the ICDE 10+ year influential research awards.

In addition to current members of the Chair of Databases, the event was attended by most of Prof. Rahm’s former doctoral students as well as colleagues from the database community and ScaDS.AI, which led to lively discussions during dinner after the presentations.