Georgios Fakas
Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor at Department of Information Technology; Division of Computing Science
- Telephone:
- +46 18 471 28 46
- E-mail:
- georgios.fakas@it.uu.se
- Visiting address:
- Lägerhyddsvägen 7, hus 19
SE-752 37 Uppsala
Sweden - Postal address:
- Box 337
751 05 UPPSALA
- Academic merits:
- research fellow
- ORCID:
- 0000-0002-8313-5538
Short presentation
I am an Associate Professor (Docent) at the Dep. of Information Technology, Uppsala University. I am currently leading the Uppsala DataBase Laboratory (UDBL). Before joining Uppsala University, I worked as a Research Fellow at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong University, EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland), UMIST (Manchester, UK). I also worked as a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University (UK).
Please visit my personal page: http://user.it.uu.se/~geofa117/
Keywords
- database
- data
- big data
- social networks
- geospatial data
- database technologies
- keyword search and ranking
- graphs
Biography
NEWS: PhD position. We are recruiting a PhD student. Deadline is 2nd of January 2025. You can find more information and apply here.
Georgios Fakas (Γεώργιος Φάκας , 佐治.法卡斯)
Please also visit my personal page at http://user.it.uu.se/~geofa117/ or the page of our lab at Uppsala DataBase Laboratory.
I am an Associate Professor (Docent) at the Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University. Before joining Uppsala University, I worked as a Research Fellow at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong University, EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland), UMIST (Manchester, UK), University of Cyprus (Cyprus). I also worked as a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University (UK). I have published papers in the most influential conferences and journals of data management, including SIGMOD, PVLDB, VLDB Journal, IEEE TKDE, DKE, etc.
Education. I obtained my Ph.D. in 1998, my M.Phil. in 1996 and my B.Sc. in Computation in 1995; all from the Department of Computation, UMIST, Manchester, UK.
Current funding
eSSENCE, Sweden. Principal Investigator for the project “Data-intensive analytics for discovering critical minerals using Machine Learning”, Call for PhD projects in the eSSENCE graduate school in data-intensive science 2024. In collaboration with streamanalyze.com (Tore Risch) and www.smartexploration.se (Bjarne Almqvist).
PhD Supervision
Completed at UU: (1) Georgios Kalamatianos completed in December 2022, (2) Khalid Mahmood completed in January 2022.
Completed at MMU: (3) Zhi Cai was my second PhD student (completed his PhD in 2011). Dr. Cai is currently a Lecturer at the Beijing University of Technology, China. (4) Ben Cawley was my first PhD student (completed his PhD in 2008). Dr. Cawley's first employment was in a start up company in the U.K.
Professional Activities.
Member of Programme Committees:
- 2025: ACM SIGMOD.
- 2024: PVLDB.
- 2023: PVLDB.
- 2021: ACM SIGMOD, EDBT.
- 2020: ACM SIGMOD, IEEE ICDE.
- 2019: ACM SIGMOD, SSTD, WISE, IEEE/ACM WI’19.
- 2018: HDMS, WESOACS.
- 2010: HDMS.
- 2005: HICSS.
- 2001: ACM SAC.
Frequent Reviewer for:
- IEEE TKDE, VLDBJ (Elsevier), IS (Elsevier), DKE (Elsevier), IST (Elsevier).
Research
My research interests include (1) big data; (2) keyword search and ranking on (semi) structure data and (attributed) graphs; (3) web search; (4) online (geo) social networks. I am also interested in (5) workflow management. Other research interests also include Computers in Education, Distance and Collaborative Learning.

Publications
Recent publications
Proportionality on Spatial Data with Context
Part of ACM Transactions on Database Systems, p. 1-37, 2023
- DOI for Proportionality on Spatial Data with Context
- Download full text (pdf) of Proportionality on Spatial Data with Context
Proportionality in Spatial Keyword Search
Part of Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Management of Data, p. 885-897, 2021
Diversified spatial keyword search on RDF data
Part of The VLDB journal, p. 1171-1189, 2020
- DOI for Diversified spatial keyword search on RDF data
- Download full text (pdf) of Diversified spatial keyword search on RDF data
Thematic ranking of object summaries for keyword search
Part of Data & Knowledge Engineering, p. 1-17, 2018
Diverse and proportional size-l object summaries using pairwise relevance
Part of The VLDB journal, p. 791-816, 2016
All publications
Articles in journal
Proportionality on Spatial Data with Context
Part of ACM Transactions on Database Systems, p. 1-37, 2023
- DOI for Proportionality on Spatial Data with Context
- Download full text (pdf) of Proportionality on Spatial Data with Context
Diversified spatial keyword search on RDF data
Part of The VLDB journal, p. 1171-1189, 2020
- DOI for Diversified spatial keyword search on RDF data
- Download full text (pdf) of Diversified spatial keyword search on RDF data
Thematic ranking of object summaries for keyword search
Part of Data & Knowledge Engineering, p. 1-17, 2018
Diverse and proportional size-l object summaries using pairwise relevance
Part of The VLDB journal, p. 791-816, 2016
Versatile Size-l Object Summaries for Relational Keyword Search
Part of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, p. 1026-1038, 2014
Size-/ object summaries for relational keyword search
Part of Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, p. 229-240, 2011
A novel keyword search paradigm in relational databases: Object summaries
Part of Data & Knowledge Engineering, p. 208-229, 2011
Automated generation of personal data reports from relational databases
Part of Journal of Information & Knowledge Management, p. 193-208, 2011
The evaluation of the Cultural Journeys in the Information Society environment as an educational aid
Part of Computers and education, p. 123-139, 2005
Part of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), p. 189-216, 2005
A peer to peer (P2P) architecture for dynamic workflow management
Part of Information and Software Technology, p. 423-431, 2004
Electronic roads: intelligent navigation through multi-contextual information
Part of Knowledge and Information Systems, p. 103-124, 2004
Workflow requirements modelling using XML
Part of Requirements Engineering, p. 124-138, 2002
Conference papers
Proportionality in Spatial Keyword Search
Part of Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Management of Data, p. 885-897, 2021
Diverse and proportional size-l object summaries for keyword search
Part of Proc. 41st ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, p. 363-375, 2015
Part of International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases, p. 431-450, 2015
Part of Data Engineering, 2009. ICDE’09. IEEE 25th International Conference on, p. 1580-1583, 2009
An architecture for reliable mobile workflow in a grid environment
Part of Internet and Web Applications and Services, 2009. ICIW’09. Fourth International Conference on, p. 499-504, 2009
Part of Data Engineering Workshop, 2008. ICDEW 2008. IEEE 24th International Conference on, p. 564-567, 2008
Part of Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 2006. EMBS’06. 28th Annual International Conference of the IEEE, p. 5663-5666, 2006