Klaus R. Dittrich is a professor in the Department of Information Technology at the University of Zurich, where he heads the Database Technology Research Group. he is the current secretary of the VLDB Endowment Board and has been a member of the ACM SIGMOD Advisory Committee. Professor Dittrich has been nominated as a Distinguished Speaker under the IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitors. He has over 100 scientific publications in the area of database technology and, in particular, has followed and influenced the development of object database technology from its inception.