Two new professors for the Hasso Plattner Institute

03/03/2025

The Hasso Plattner Institute's professorship is growing by two more departments. From March 1, Prof. Dr. Sandra Wachter and Prof. Dr. Eleni Tzirita Zacharatou will head the “Technology and Regulation” and “Spatial Analytics and Large-Scale Data Processing” departments at the institute, respectively. 

Prof. Sandra Wachter: Second Humboldt Professorship at HPI

Prof. Sandra Wachter is the second professor with a Humboldt Professorship to start at the joint Digital Engineering Faculty of the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) and the University of Potsdam (UP). The AI expert has been awarded the “Humboldt Professorship for Artificial Intelligence”, which is the most highly endowed international award for research in Germany with 3.5 million euros. 

At HPI, Prof. Wachter and her “Technology and Regulation” department are particularly dedicated to interdisciplinary research in technology law and AI regulation. Topics such as the regulation of generative AI, algorithmic fairness and explainability as well as the ethics of AI play a special role here. Prof. Wachter has already won numerous prizes for her research in this area and has also supported governments, companies and non-governmental organizations in an advisory capacity on ethical and regulatory issues relating to new technologies. She also holds a professorship at the Oxford Internet Institute of the University of Oxford.

Prof. Wachter: “The HPI stands for innovation, drive and active science and I look forward to working with the researchers and students.” 

The Humboldt Professorship is awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

Prof. Tzirita Zacharatou strengthens HPI with expertise in spatial data analysis

Prof. Eleni Tzirita Zacharatou will hold one of the new tenure-track professorships at HPI. With the tenure-track professorships, the institute supports young researchers at an early stage of their scientific career so that they can independently pursue science and teaching on a reliable basis.

Prof. Tzirita Zacharatou's research focuses on developing data management tools that improve the efficiency of data analysis and enable timely, data-driven decision-making. A specific focus is on applications processing large volumes of spatial data, such as using satellite images to monitor climate change or analyzing urban traffic patterns to optimize city planning.

As head of the “Spatial Analytics and Large-Scale Data Processing” department at HPI, Prof. Tzirita Zacharatou is particularly interested in projects that involve the efficient processing of spatial data (including geographic information and remote sensing data), accelerating data processing through the use of modern hardware (like GPUs), and developing methods for managing dynamic data within heterogeneous distributed computing environments.

She is particularly looking forward to engaging with HPI students through research and teaching, establishing her new research department, and joining the vibrant database community in the Berlin-Brandenburg area.

Prof. Tzirita Zacharatou has previously served as an assistant professor at the IT University of Copenhagen (ITU) and as a postdoctoral researcher at the Technical University of Berlin (TUB). She holds a Ph.D. from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and has been a visiting researcher at New York University (NYU).