Prof. Garofalakis was the Core Database Technology PC Chair for VLDB'2007, the Knowledge Management Track PC Chair for ACM CIKM'2014, and the General Co-Chair for IEEE ICDE'2021, and has completed Associate Editor/Editorial Board Member terms for various journals in the data management field, including ACM Transactions on Database Systems (ACM TODS, 2008-2011), IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (IEEE TKDE, 2007-2011), and Foundations and Trends in Databases (FnTDB, 2006-2019). He has also repeatedly served on the program committees of all major data-management conferences (including ACM SIGMOD, VLDB, ACM PODS, IEEE ICDE, and ACM SIGKDD), often in PC Group Leader/Area Vice-Chair roles.
Prof. Garofalakis' research interests are in the broad areas of Big Data analytics and large-scale machine learning, including database systems, centralized/distributed data streams, data synopses and approximate query processing, uncertain databases, and data mining and knowledge discovery. He has published over 150 scientific papers in top-tier international conferences and journals in these areas. He received the 2009 IEEE ICDE Best Paper Award for his paper "Histograms and Wavelets on Probabilistic Data" (with G. Cormode, AT&T-Labs), and 8 of his SIGMOD/PODS/VLDB papers have been invited to journal special issues (ranking in the top 3-5 papers of their respective conferences). He has delivered several invited keynote talks and conference tutorials on approximate query processing, data-stream processing, and distributed data streams, and has given invited tutorials on data streaming at the 2008 VLDB School in Cairo, Egypt, the 2015 INIT/AERFAI Summer School on Machine Learning, the 2015 and 2017 International Winter School on Big Data, and the 1st ACM Europe Summer School on Data Science and Big Data. His work has resulted in 36 US Patent filings (29 patents issued) for companies such as Lucent, Yahoo!, and AT&T. GoogleScholar gives over 16.000 citations to Prof. Garofalakis' work, and an h-index value of 69. He is/has been the recipient of an FP7 Marie-Curie International Reintegration Fellowship (2010-2014), and a PI for LIFT (FP7-ICT-FET Open project, 2010-2013), LEADS (FP7-ICT-STREP project, 2012-2015), FERARI (FP7-ICT-STREP project, 2014-2017), QualiMaster (FP7-ICT-STREP project, 2014-2017), and The Human Brain Project (FET Open Flagship project, 2013-2016). Prof. Garofalakis is an ACM Fellow (2018) "for contributions to data processing and analytics, particularly data streaming, approximation and uncertainty", an IEEE Fellow (2017) "for contributions to data streaming analytics", a Member of Academia Europaea (2023), and a recipient of the TUC "Excellence in Research" Award (2015), the Bell Labs President's Gold Award (2004), and the Bell Labs Teamwork Award (2003).