Wolfgang Gatterbauer is an associate professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. He is working on the theory of scalable data management: His ultimate goal is to extend the capabilities of modern data management systems in generic ways to allow them to support novel functionalities that seem hard at first, such as managing provenance, trust, explanations, and uncertain or inconsistent data. To support these functionalities, Gatterbauer is interested in understanding the fundamental algebraic properties that allow algorithms to scale with the size of data by leveraging structure in data: Given a large data or knowledge base, what types of questions can we answer efficiently? And what do we do about those that we cannot?

For the hard questions, his group tries to find ways to change the objective in a way that qualitatively preserves the original motivation yet installs those desirable algebraic properties (something we call ”algebraic cheating”). His group’s recent work has shown that approaches that leverage those properties and optimize for the overall end-to-end goal can work with less training data and achieve remarkable speedups.

Gatterbauer holds a doctorate in Computer Science from the Technical University of Vienna, a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the Technical University of Graz, and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. Before joining Northeastern University, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the database group at the University of Washington and an assistant professor in the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University.