Johannes Gehrke
Tisch University Professor
Department of Computer Sciences
4105B Upson Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
johannes [at] cs [dot] cornell [dot] edu
Voice: 607-821-1685; fax: 607-255-4428
Short biography.
My research lies in the design and
implementation of scalable data-driven systems. I currently work on three
topics: Scalability in
computer games and simulations, data privacy, and data
mining. For more on my research, go to the homepage of the Cornell Big Red Data Group.
Selected Recent
Publications

- Tao Zou, Ronan Le Bras, Marcos Vaz Salles, Alan Demers,
and Johannes Gehrke. ClouDiA: A Deployment Advisor for Public Clouds. VLDB 2013.
- Gabriel Bender, Lucja Kot, Johannes Gehrke, and
Christoph Koch. Fine-Grained Disclosure Control for App Ecosystems. To
appear at SIGMOD 2013.
- Sudip Roy, Lucja Kot, Christoph Koch. Quantum
Databases. CIDR 2013.
- Istemi Ekin Akkus, Ruichuan Chen, Michaela Hardt, Paul
Francis, Johannes Gehrke. Non-tracking
web analytics. CCS 2012.
- Cheng Li, Daniel Porto, Allen Clement, Rodrigo
Rodrigues, Nuno Preguiça, Johannes Gehrke. Making
Geo-Replicated Systems Fast if Possible, Consistent when Necessary.
OSDI 2012.
- Yin Lou, Noah Snavely, and Johannes Gehrke. MatchMiner: Efficient Spanning Structure Mining in
Large Image Collections. ECCV 2012.
- Sigal Oren, Konstantinos Mamouras, Lior
Seeman, Lucja Kot, and Johannes Gehrke. The
Complexity of Social Coordination. PVLDB 2012.
- Yin Lou, Rich Caruana, and Johannes Gehrke. Intelligible Models for
Classification and Regression. SIGKDD 2012.
- Johannes Gehrke, Michael Hay, Edward Lui, and Rafael
Pass. Crowd-Blending Privacy. Crypto 2012. Article
about the work in Technology Review.
- Michaela
Götz, Suman Nath, Johannes Gehrke. MaskIt: privately releasing user context streams for
personalized mobile applications. SIGMOD Conference 2012: 289-300.
- Raphael
M. Reischuk, Michael Backes, Johannes Gehrke. SAFE extensibility of
data-driven web applications. WWW 2012: 799-808. Project Website.
- Tao Zou, Guozhang Wang, Marcos Vaz Salles, David
Bindel, Alan Demers, Johannes Gehrke, Walker White. Making Time-stepped
Applications Tick in the Cloud. SOCC 2011.
- Nitin Gupta, Milos Nikolic, Sudip Roy, Gabriel Bender,
Lucja Kot, Johannes Gehrke, Christoph Koch. Entangled
Transactions. VLDB 2011.
- Nitin Gupta, Lucja Kot, Sudip Roy, Gabriel Bender,
Johannes Gehrke, Christoph Koch. Entangled Queries: Enabling
Declarative Data-Driven Coordination. SIGMOD 2011.
- Tuan Cao, Marcos Vaz Salles, Benjamin Sowell, Yao Yue,
Johannes Gehrke, Alan Demers, Walker White: Fast Checkpoint Recovery
Algorithms for Frequently Consistent Applications. SIGMOD 2011.
- Jiaqi Zhai, Yin Lou, Johannes Gehrke: ATLAS: A
Probabilistic Algorithm for High Dimensional Similarity Search. SIGMOD
2011.
- Xiaokui Xiao, Gabriel Bender, Michael Hay, and Johannes
Gehrke: iReduct:
Differential Privacy with Reduced Relative Errors. SIGMOD 2011.
Full
list of my publications (from DBLP).
Awards
- 2011
Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists,
Faculty Winner. (Cornell
Chronicle article; press release)
- The 2011 ACM
SIGMOD Conference, Best Paper Award.
- IEEE
Computer Society Technical Achievement Award, 2011.
- Humboldt Research
Award, Alexander
von Humboldt Foundation, 2010.
- New York State
Foundation for Science, Technology, and Innovation, Faculty
Development Grant, 2007. (Press release.)
- Cornell University Provost’s Award for Distinguished
Scholarship, 2004. (Cornell
Chronicle article.)
- Alfred P. Sloan
Research Fellowship, 2003. (Cornell
Chronicle article.)
- National
Science Foundation CAREER Award, 2002. (Cornell
Chronicle article.)
- Cornell College of Engineering James and Mary Tien
Excellence in Teaching Award, 2001.
- IBM Faculty Development Award 2000 and 2001.
Selected
Professional Activities
Recent Talks
- Declarative
Data-Driven Coordination. Keynote at the Fifth ACM International Conference on
Distributed Event-Based Systems (DEBS 2011). New York, NY, July 2011.
- Playing Games with Databases. Keynote at the 27th IEEE International
Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2011). Hanover, Germany, April
2011.
- Monitoring
the Data Tsunami. Keynote at the opening ceremony for the special
research thrust “SFB 876:
Providing Information by Resource-Constrained Data Analysis.” Technical
University of Dortmund, January 2011.
- How to Play Games with Databases. Distinguished
Lecturer Series, Department of Computer Science, University of Alberta.
Edmonton, Canada, March 2010.
- Bringing Database
Research to Computer Games and Simulations. Keynote at the 35th
International Conference on Very Large Data Bases. Lyon, France. August
2009.
People
- Current PhD Students
- Postdocs: Lucja Kot.
- Alumni:
- Philippe Bonnet (Research
Associate, 1999-2001). First employment: Associate Professor, Department
of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen; now Associate Professor at
IT University of Copenhagen.
- Zhiyuan Chen (Ph.D., August
2002; co-advised with Praveen Seshadri). First
employment: Microsoft
Research, now Associate Professor, Information Systems Department,
University of Maryland Baltimore County.
- Tuan Cao (Ph.D., May
2013). First employment: Google.
- Adina Crăiniceanu
(Ph.D., December 2005). First employment: Assistant Professor, United States Naval Academy.
- Abhinandan Das (Ph.D., August 2005). First employment: Google.
- Alin Dobra (Ph.D., July
2003). First employment: Assistant Professor, Department of Computer and Information
Science and Engineering, University of Florida. Now Associate
Professor, University of Florida.
- Alexandre Evfimievski
(Ph.D., August 2004). First employment: IBM Almaden
Research Center.
- Michaela Götz (Ph.D., January 2012).
First employment: Twitter.
- Nitin Gupta (Ph.D.,
December 2011). First employment: Google.
- Michael Hay (Computing
Innovations Fellow, August 2010 to August 2012). First employment:
Assistant Professor, Colgate University.
- Mingsheng Hong
(Ph.D., November 2008; co-advised with Alan Demers, Mirek
Riedewald, and Walker White). First employment:
Vertica.
- Dan Kifer (Ph.D., August 2006
and postdoc September 2006 to August 2007). First employment: Yahoo! Research; now Assistant
Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Penn State
University.
- Prakash Linga (Ph.D., June 2007, co-advised with Jayavel
Shanmugasundaram). First employment: Moka5.
- Ashwin Machanavajjhala (Ph.D.,
August 2008). First employment: Yahoo!
Research; now Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science,
Duke University.
- David Martin (Ph.D.,
August 2008; co-advised with Joe Halpern). First employment: Google.
- Tobias Mayr (Ph.D., August 2001; co-advised with Praveen Seshadri). First employment: IBM Almaden
Research Center.
- Biswanath Panda (Ph.D.,
February 2009; co-advised with Mirek Riedewald). First employment: Google.
- Mirek
Riedewald (Research Associate, 2002-2008).
First employment: Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, Northeastern
University.
- Ben Sowell (Ph.D., May 2012;
co-advised with Alan Demers). First employment: Nou Data.
- Niki Trigoni (postdoc,
November 2002 to July 2004). First employment: Lecturer, School of Computer Science and
Information Systems, Birkbeck, University of
London. Now University Lecturer, Department
of Computer Science, University of
Oxford.
- Marcos Vaz Salles
(postdoc, December 2008 to July 2011). First employment: Assistant
Professor, Department of Computer
Science, University of Copenhagen.
- Felix Weigel
(postdoc, January 2007 to February 2009). First employment: Nokia; now at
Google.
- Xiaokui Xiao (postdoc,
August 2008 to July 2009). First employment: Assistant Professor,
Division of Information Systems, Nanyang
Technological University.
- Fan Yang (Ph.D., July 2008;
co-advised with Jayavel Shanmugasundaram). First employment: Google.
- Yong Yao (Ph.D.,
January 2007; co-advised with Alan Demers). First employment: IBM Silicon
Valley Lab; now at Google.
Acknowledgments
My
research is partially supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants
IIS-0121175, IIS-0621438, and
CNS-0627680, by AFOSR,
and by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions
or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do
not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors.