Gabriele Kotsis


Gabriele Kotsis is an Austrian computer scientist. She is full professor in computer science at Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria, while leading the Department of Telecommunication and the division of Cooperative Information Systems. She was vice-rector for Research and the Advancement of Women, and longstanding chairwoman of Universities Austria's Policy Committee on Research. She is a distinguished member and elected president of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Early life and education

Gabriele Kotsis received her masters degree in business informatics at the University of Vienna and finished her doctoral studies in social- and economic sciences at the University of Vienna, graduating two times with distinction. In 2000, she habilitated in Informatics at the University of Vienna. She received scientific recognition early on: her master’s thesis Interconnection Topologies and Routing for Parallel Processing Systems at the University of Vienna was honored with a student sponsorship award of the Austrian Computer Society. Furthermore, her PhD dissertation Workload Modeling for Parallel Processing was honored with the prestigious Heinz Zemanek Award in 1996.

Career and research

Already during her doctoral studies, she took a job as a university assistant at the Department of Applied Informatics and Information Systems at the University of Vienna. She worked as a guest professor at the Department of Information Processing and Information Economy at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. In 2002, she was a guest professor at the Department of Informatics at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark and the Department of Telecooperation at the JKU, before she was appointed as professor of informatics. In the same year, she was one of the co-founding chairs of the working group for professors in computer science within the Austrian Computer Society, of which she was the first female President from 2003 to 2007. In addition to her two-term presidency at OCG, Kotsis takes an active role in the Editorial board of the OCG Book Series, in the working group Fem-IT and in the OCG award committee.
From 2007 to 2015, she served as vice-rector for Research at JKU. Her responsibilities included the development of R&D strategies and policies in the university, coordination and interaction with national and international governmental organizations and funding bodies, and the establishment of collaborations with other research organizations and business partners.
Since 2016, Gabriele has been JKU's representative in the ASEA-UNINET academic research network, which promotes cooperation among European and south-East Asian public universities. Her active involvement in this network led to her nomination and election as President for the current period, February 2019 to July 2020.
Kotsis is a founding member of the ACM Europe Council, serving at the council from 2008 to 2016. In 2014, she became an ACM Distinguished Member for her contributions to workload characterization for parallel and distributed systems and for the founding of ACM Europe. In 2016, she received an award in appreciation of her accomplishments regarding the ACM WomEncourage conference series. As of 2016, she is an elected Member-at-Large of the ACM council. She serves as President of ACM for the term July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2022.
She is a member of the Austrian Center for Parallel Computation, the Austrian Computer Society and Distinguished Scientist of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Honors and awards

Her publications include: