The Institut f¨ur Informationssysteme, located at the Technische Universit¨at Wien, Austria, comprises three
groups: the Distributed Systems Group (DS), the Databases and Artificial Intelligence Group (DBAI), and
the Knowledge Based Systems Group (KBS), which are centered around chairs in these areas. Currently,
the Institute has about 40 members scientific staff, including faculty and research project employees. DBAI and KBS are closely interacting and have extensive experience and competence, in both research and teaching, in databases, artificial intelligence, and computational logic. The current areas of research include principles of database systems, knowledge representation, software and information agents, logic in databases and artificial intelligence, model-based and qualitative reasoning, and many others. The research results have been disseminated in numerous publications in top-level scientific conferences and journals in the field. A number of projects funded by companies, national funding agencies, and the European Community have produced essential theoretical research results as well as implemented systems some of which were distributed to companies. The high quality of research is further documented by the fact that during the last decade, eight members of DBAI and KBS were appointed as full professors in various universities in Austria, Australia, Germany, and Italy. The Institute f¨ur Informationssysteme has been a member of the ESPRIT COMPULOG Network of Excellence for more than ten years, and is one of the area coordinating sites in the successive CologNet thematic network, responsible for the area “Logic-Based Data and Knowledge Systems.” From 1990–1997, the Institute hosted the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Expert Systems, which was funded by the Austrian Industries for promoting long term basic and applied research. Since 1999, the Institute hosts the Ludwig Wittgenstein Labor f¨ur Informationssysteme, which is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) through a Ludwig Wittgenstein prize, the most prestigious Austrian scientific research distinction, which was awarded to Prof. Georg Gottlob, head of the DBAI group, in 1998. The Institut f¨ur Informationssysteme has a number of research cooperations with international institutions and companies, including Stanford University, University of California at Irvine, Politecnico diMilano, University of Maryland, Kyoto University, Universit`a di Roma “La Sapienza,” University of Manchester, Siemens AG, and DaimlerChrysler, to mention just a few. The people of TUWIEN who will be involved in the INFOMIX project are Thomas Eiter (Full Professor), Georg Gottlob (Full Professor), Wolfgang Faber (Assistant), Gerald Pfeifer (Assistant Professor), Giuliana Sabbatini (PhD Student), Michael Fink (PhD Student), and Hans Tompits (Assistant Professor).

Key Persons

Thomas Eiter, born 1966, is a full professor in the Computer Science Department of Technische Universit
¨at Wien (since 1998), Austria, where he heads the KBS Group. Before (1996-1998), he was an associate
professor of Computer Science at the University of Giessen, Germany. Dr. Eiter’s research interests include
knowledge representation, logic programming, knowledge-based agents, and complexity in AI. He is
a coauthor of the book “Heterogeneous Agent Systems” that emerged from the multi-national IMPACT project on a platform for declarative agent programming. The results of IMPACT are published in several journals (Artificial Intelligence, e.g., JACM, ACM Trans. on Computational Logic, and IEEE Intelligent Systems). Dr. Eiter has more than hundred publications, a number of which appeared in top journals (including Artificial Intelligence, JACM, JCSS, TODS, TKDE...) and conferences (IJCAI, AAAI, PODS, KR,...), and was involved in several national and international research projects. He was on the program committee of many conferences including PODS, LICS, ICMAS, KR, and is general co-chair of the 2001 Joint International German/Austrian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI 2001), and the 2001 Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning (LPNMR’01). Furthermore, he is associate editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) and the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE).

Georg Gottlob, born 1956, is a full professor in the Computer Science Department of Technische Universit
¨at Wien (since 1988), Austria, where he heads the Database and Artificial Intelligence Group. His
research interests include Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Complexity in AI, Database Theory,
Complexity Theory, Theory of diagnosis and diagnostic expert systems and Autonomous Agents. He was a
research associate at the Politecnico di Milano, a staff researcher of the Institute of Applied Mathematics of
the C.N.R., and a lecturer and research associate at Stanford University. Dr. Gottlob is author and co-author of more than 130 publications in top journals (JACM, Artificial Intelligence, IEEE Transactions,...) and conferences (IJCAI, KR, AAAI, PODS,...). Currently, he is Editor in Chief of The European Journal of
Artificial Intelligence (AI Communications), and on the editorial board of several journals, including Artifi-
cial Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and Theory and Practice of Logic
Programming. Dr. Gottlob was program chair of PODS 2000 and is designated program chair of IJCAI 2003. He has been involved in several Esprit projects (VENIVA Proj.Nr. 20638, SIT-MOON Proj.Nr. 25652) and Networks of Excellence (COMPULOG, IDOMENEUS).

Wolfgang Faber, born 1974, is a junior faculty member of the KBS Group at the Computer Science Department of Technische Universit¨at Wien, Austria, since 1999. He has been a tutor, student assistant and
research grant recipient from 1994 until 1998. In 1998 he has received a Dipl.-Ing. degree (roughly equivalent to a Master’s degree). Between 1998 and 1999 he was a research assistant at the DBAI Group of Technische Universit¨at Wien, and primarily involved in the DLV project. The DLV project has produced
a state-of-the-art system for disjunctive deductive databases, which is used in academia for research and
teaching purposes. Wolfgang Faber’s current research interests are in knowledge representation, logic programming and nonmonotonic reasoning, planning, and knowledge-based agents. He has published about 20 papers so far, and is involved in the organization of the 2001 Joint International German/Austrian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, and the 2001 Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning.