BIOGRAPHY

Prof. Bela Gipp (Dr.-Ing.) holds the chair for Scientific Information Analytics at the University of Göttingen, Germany, and is the Scientific Director/Vice Director of the Göttingen State and University Library (SUB).

His research interests lie at the intersection of Information Science and Data Science. His group’s research focuses on developing and applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and methods for retrieving, analyzing, and visualizing information in large datasets. The implications of blockchain technology—for the benefit of both industry and society—is another research domain that Bela is passionate about.

Previously, Bela was a full professor at the University of Wuppertal, where he held the chair for Data & Knowledge Engineering from 2018 to 2022. Before that, Bela served as a junior professor at the University of Konstanz, where he led the Information Science Group from 2015 to 2018. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science (summa cum laude) at the University of Magdeburg in 2013. He conducted the majority of his doctoral research abroad while on a 4-year research scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley. While at UC Berkeley, he also made use of the proximity to the Silicon Valley to found the tech start-up SciPlore and co-found Docear. After his Ph.D., he received postdoctoral research fellowships at U.C. Berkeley and the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo.

In his youth, Bela participated in Jugend Forscht, Germany’s premier youth science competition. After winning 1st place at the state-level competition three times, he was honored by the German Chancellor and Germany’s Federal President. Scholarships allowed him to study semesters abroad in Sydney, Beijing, Staffordshire, and at UC Berkeley. Today, he is involved as a jury member and mentor for Jugend Forscht and tech startups.

Bela has published over 200 peer-reviewed conference papers and journal articles, in addition to several books and patents, which have received more than 10,000 citations; his h-index is approximately 50. Currently, he is the PI of these DFG-funded projects. He has secured over 10 million EUR in third-party funding and venture capital investments for his research thus far. Additionally, he maintains active research collaborations with industry. For example, he founded OriginStamp AG, based in Switzerland.

Bela serves as a DFG-nominated member of the Digitality in Science Initiative of the Alliance of Science Organizations in Germany and board member of the Interdisciplinary Center for Machine Learning and Data Analytics. He is a member of the scientific advisory board for the DAAD Program offering International Research Stays for Computer Scientists and the internationalization officer of the Institute for Computer Science. In his spare time, Bela enjoys photography, designing, building, and flying innovative drones, and he loves to paraglide in the Alps.