Michael Gertz is a full professor at Heidelberg University, leading the Data Science Group within the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science. He holds a diploma from TU Dortmund University and a Dr. rer. nat. from Leibniz University Hannover (1996). Before joining Heidelberg in 2008, he was faculty at the University of California, Davis (1997–2008). His research spans Data Science, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Complex Networks, and Legal Technology, with applications in law, medicine, economics, and political sciences. Academic roles include Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science (2014–2016), Managing Director of the Institute of Computer Science (2016–2023), and co-speaker of the Helmholtz Information & Data Science School for Health (since 2019). He has held editorial roles at ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems, ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality, and The VLDB Journal. Research focuses on interdisciplinary projects, such as legal text analysis, network models, and scientific data management. He has presented widely, including keynote speeches on AI in law and legal technology. His work emphasizes exploring quantities in text, temporal networks, and event detection in social media. Professional activities include program committee memberships for conferences like SIGIR, EMNLP, and CIKM, as well as reviewing for funding agencies like the Helmholtz Society and DFG. He is a member of ACM, IEEE Computer Society (inactive since 2012), and Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI). Key projects include developing frameworks like EVELIN, CQE, and QuantPlorer, and datasets such as EUR-Lex-Sum and Klexikon. His contributions bridge computational methods and domain-specific applications, fostering innovation in data-driven solutions across disciplines.
