Foto N. Afrati is a professor in the Electrical and Computing Engineering Department of the NTUA, Greece. She received a B.S. degree from the Mechanical and Electrical Engineering Department of National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and a Ph.D. from Imperial College of the University of London. She is a Fellow of ACM. She has received the ACM Recognition for Service Award in 2005 and the best-paper award in ICDT 2009. She has been the program-committee chair for the Conference on Principles of Databases (PODS) 2005, and for the International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT) 1997, for which she was the organizing committee chair as well. She currently serves as associate editor of the IEEE TKDE journal. In 2012-2013, she spent her sabbatical leave visiting Google at Mountain View. She has published over 100 papers in the areas of databases, algorithms, and distributed computing. Her research interests are in the area of database theory, recent research interests are mainly in the area of big data, including query optimization for MapReduce and other distributed platforms.
