John Mylopoulos

John Mylopoulos is the founder of the artificial intelligence (AI) group at the University of Toronto which since its inception has been recognized as one of the best AI groups in the world. He is the first and most influential researcher to have made lasting and deep contributions to the three separate computer science fields of artificial intelligence, data management, and software engineering. He pioneered the use of conceptual modelling within all three fields. His seminal work on requirements modelling has had a lasting impact on academic research and industrial practice, and provides a foundation for the popular software engineering practice of model-driven software development. He is an academic leader and has been elected to top research positions in all three fields.

Mylopoulos has mentored a generation of researchers that include Canada Research Chairs, Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada, ACM Fellows, and experts in a large number of subareas of computer science. In 2009, his PhD descendants numbered over 260 (and this excludes the hundreds of post-doctoral fellows and master students he has had). These intellectual descendants populate and lead Computer Science departments and industrial research groups across Canada and the world. John was recognized with the 2014 Lifetime Service Award at the International Requirements Engineering Conference (the top venue in requirements engineering) for his leadership role and outstanding mentorship and support of young faculty.

Mylopoulos’ research record places him among the top computer scientists in the world. On Nov 27, 2016 Google Scholar reports 33,293 citations with an h-index of 83 and i10-index of 329. He has won at least ten paper prizes (including two test-of-time impact awards) as well as being elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and Fellow of the Entity-Relationship Foundation. He has received the Peter C. Chen Award, the highest honour in Conceptual Modelling research. There are very few computer scientists in the world with such an exceptional research record. He was the first Bell Canada Chair of Information Systems at the University of Toronto and holds an honorary doctorate from RWTH Aachen University.

Since retiring from Toronto in 2009, Mylopoulos has played a central role in the establishment of the Informatics department at the University of Trento, Italy. At Trento, Mylopoulos was awarded a very competitive European Research Council Advanced Grant for exceptional established research leaders. During his tenure, Trento rose to be ranked as one of the top three Informatics departments in Italy (together with the much larger and older departments in Milan and Rome). Since retiring from Trento, Mylopoulos has begun a third career back in Canada with an appointment at the University of Ottawa. In 2015 and 2016, Mylopoulos published over two dozen publications in some of the highest impact forums in requirements engineering, conceptual modelling, and data management including Requirements Engineering, International Conference on Conceptual Modelling (ER), and the ACM Transactions on Database Systems most with student mentees.