Following stations at the universities of Dresden, Ekaterinburg, Leipzig, Pennsylvania, Bonn and the Fraunhofer Society, Prof. Auer was appointed Professor of Data Science and Digital Libraries at Leibniz Universität Hannover and Director of the TIB in 2017. Prof. Auer has made important contributions to semantic technologies, knowledge engineering and information systems. He is the author (resp. co-author) of over 100 peer-reviewed scientific publications. He has received several awards, including an ERC Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council, a SWSA ten-year award, the ESWC 7-year Best Paper Award, and the OpenCourseware Innovation Award. He has led several large collaborative research projects, such as the EU H2020 flagship project BigDataEurope. He is co-founder of high potential research and community projects such as the Wikipedia semantification project DBpedia, the OpenCourseWare authoring platform SlideWiki.org and the innovative technology start-up eccenca.com. Prof. Auer was founding director of the Big Data Value Association, led the semantic data representation in the Industrial/International Data Space, is an expert for industry, European Commission, W3C and member of the advisory board of the Open Knowledge Foundation.

The research focus - with special attention on semantic data interlinking for artificial intelligence - are in the following areas:

• Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Representation, Engineering & Management
• Information Systems, Databases, Data Integration, Linked Data, Semantic and Web Technologies
• Software and Systems Engineering, data-driven Platforms, Web Engineering
• Enterprise Integration, Semantically enhanced Service Oriented Architectures
• Digital Libraries, E-Science, Science Governance, Peer-Review, Open Access
• Semantic Data Integration for Engineering & Manufacturing (Industry 4.0), Mobility and Built Environment (Smart Cities), Digital Libraries & Research Infrastructures