Avigdor Gal is the Benjamin and Florence Free Chaired Professor of Data Science at The Faculty of Data & Decision Sciences at the Technion . He is a Technion graduate and an expert on information systems. His research focuses on effective methods of integrating data from multiple and diverse sources, which affect the way businesses and consumers seek information over the Internet.

His current work zeroes in on schema matching — the task of providing communication between databases, and connecting such communication to real-world concepts. Another line of research involves the identification of complex events such as flu epidemics, biological attacks, and breaches in computer security, and its application to disaster and crisis management. He has applied his research to European and American projects in government, eHealth, and the integration of business documents.

Born in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Prof. Gal received his bachelor’s degree in Computer Science in 1990, and in 1995 earned his doctorate in information systems engineering — both from the Technion. During his doctoral studies in the area of temporal active databases, he received the Miriam and Aaron Gutwirth Scholarship for three consecutive years (1993-1995). Alongside his studies, he served in the Israeli Air Force reserves as an information systems consultant.

After a two-year stint from 1995-1997 as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto in the Department of Computer Science, Prof. Gal started his academic career as an assistant professor at Rutgers University. He joined the Technion in 2001 and has been active in numerous Technion activities including having served as Vice Dean for Teaching from 2008-2011.

Prof. Gal has published more than 100 papers in leading professional journals (e.g. Journal of the ACM (JACM), ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT), and the VLDB Journal) and conferences (SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, BPM, DEBS, ER, CoopIS) and books (Schema Matching and Mapping). He authored the book Uncertain schema Matching in 2011, serves in various editorial capacities for periodicals including the Journal on Data Semantics (JoDS), Encyclopedia of Database Systems and Computing, and has helped organize professional workshops and conferences nearly every year since 1998.

He has won the IBM Faculty Award each year from 2002-2004, several Technion awards for teaching, the 2011-13 Technion-Microsoft Electronic Commerce Research Award, and the 2012 Yanai Award for Excellence in Academic Education, and others.

Among his many professional activities, he is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and an affiliate member of BPM Center, supported by Queensland University of Technology (Australia) and TU Eindhoven (Netherlands). He has served on several advisory boards including DEBS (Distributed Evenet-Based Systems) and CooplS (Cooperative Information Systems).