Johannes Gehrke is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft focusing on Artificial intelligence. He is best known for his contributions to database systems, data mining, and data privacy. His work on data privacy led to a new version of OnTheMap published by the US Census Bureau, the first public data product from any official government agency worldwide with provable privacy guarantees, using a variant of Differential Privacy.
Gehrke has held academic and industry leadership roles, including professor at Cornell University and chief architect and head of AI for Microsoft Teams. He is an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow, and he received the 2011 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award and the 2021 ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award.
Education
Gehrke studied computer science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology from 1990 to 1993. He received an M.S. degree from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin in 1995 and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1999, with a thesis in data mining.
Career
From 1999 to 2015, Gehrke was a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University, where his research group was known as the Big Red Data Group. He graduated 25 PhD students during his tenure. From 2005 to 2008, he served as Chief Scientist at Fast Search and Transfer.
Gehrke joined Microsoft product groups in 2012, initially building Delve and the Office Graph, then leading people and feed experiences across Microsoft 365. He later became chief architect and head of AI for the Microsoft Teams backend. From 2020 to 2023, he held a dual role managing all of Microsoft Research in Redmond while serving as CTO and head of AI for the Microsoft Teams backend.
Research Contributions
Gehrke developed some of the fastest data mining algorithms for frequent pattern mining, sequential pattern mining, and decision tree construction. He also created one of the first sensor network query processors, pioneering in-network query processing for wireless sensor networks. His research on data privacy resulted in the first official government data product with provable privacy guarantees, a significant milestone for differential privacy in practice.
Awards and Honors
Gehrke received a National Science Foundation Career Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, and a Humboldt Research Award. In 2011, he received the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award and a Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists. He became a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2014 and was elected an IEEE Fellow in 2020. In 2021, he received the ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award, recognizing outstanding technical contributions to knowledge discovery and data mining.
Books
Since its second edition, Gehrke has been a co-author of one of the main textbooks on database systems, commonly known as the Cow Book.