Thomas Roelleke

Queen Mary University of London, England

Thomas Roelleke is a senior lecturer (associate professor) and researcher at Queen Mary, University of London. He previously was a Unix/DB/4GL product manager at Nixdorf Computer, a researcher/lecturer at the University of Dortmund, and an IT strategy consultant for the online-bank comdirect. He holds a Dr rer nat (PhD) in Computer Science of the University of Dortmund, a Diplom Ingenieur-Informatik (MSc Computer Science & Engineering) of the University of Dortmund, and a technical informatics degree of the b.i.b. school (center of professions in informatics) of Nixdorf Computer, Paderborn.

Thomas' research contributions include a probabilistic relational algebra for the integration of database (DB) and information retrieval (IR), a probabilistic object-oriented logic for the retrieval of semantic and structured data, the probability of being informative, the relational Bayes for estimating probabilities in DB systems, and foundations and theories of probabilistic retrieval models.

Thomas pioneered a logic-based retrieval system, HySpirit, which provides probabilistic reasoning and seamless DB+IR technology. He was a co-organiser of the DB+IR workshop at SIGIR 04, a member of the panel "DB and IR: Rethinking the great divide" at SIGMOD 05, and is the founder of a start-up to provide innovative DB+IR technology for information management.