Todor V. Ivanov

Big Data Expert and Researcher

About Me

I am interested in the design and development of complex distributed software systems for data-intensive applications. In particular, I am interested in software architectures, performance optimizations, scalability, effective storage and processing of large-scale data systems.

🇧🇬 - native

🇺🇸 - fluent

🇩🇪 - fluent

Professional Experience

DXC Technology

Big Data & Analytics

July 2020 - June 2024

www.dxc.com

Senior Big Data Engineer

Specification, development and implementation of data and analytics intensive applications for various customer projects using Big Data technologies (Spark, Hadoop, MapR, Hive, Solar, Airflow and more).

Frankfurt Big Data Lab

Goethe University Frankfurt

July 2014 - June 2020

www.bigdata.uni-frankfurt.de

Senior Researcher

Performance and system analysis of Big Data technologies using various Big Data benchmarks (HiBench, TPCx-HS & BigBench) as well as developing and improving Big Data benchmarks.

SashiDo

Feb. 2016 - Feb. 2018

www.sashido.io

Head of Big Data Innovations & Co-Founder

SashiDo is a mobile back-end as a service built for convenience, easiness and simple developing.

Adastra GmbH

Frankfurt am Main

Jan. 2013 - Apr. 2014

adastra.de

Junior IT Consultant

Involved in multiple internal projects using: VMware ESXi, IBM Cognos, MS SharePoint, MS SQL Server, Oracle, Informatica and more.

Development of Data mart and automated UC4 Flowchart Documentation for MS Visio using XSLT transformation for Commerzbank AG, Frankfurt.

Databases and Distributed Systems

Technical University of Darmstadt

Oct. 2010 - Sept. 2012

DDS at TU Darmstadt

Research Assistant

Instrumented and performed multiple experiments with various benchmarks (TPC-B/C/H) to investigate the database performance (MySQL and PostrgeSQL) on Solid State Drives (SSDs).

Worked on the design and implementation of the Hybrid Page Layout (HPL) and its testing framework.

Airbiz GmbH

Bischofsheim, Hessen

July 2004 - Sept. 2010

Senior Software Developer

Involved in the development and implementation of fully-featured FIDS (Flight Information Display System) product FlightVision installed on multiple international airports;

Development of customized software modules and extensions; Integration in existing airport information systems.

Completed projects and setup production systems on multiple airports: Fraport Frankfurt and Frankfurt-Hahn Airports in Germany, Baghdad and Basra Airports in Iraq.

Projects

Z-Inspection

2019 - Present

Z-Inspection web

Z-Inspection - A process to assess trustworthy AI

Preparing for Z-Inspection® teaching certification

Announcing a New Pilot Project: Assessing Trustworthiness of the use of Generative AI for higher Education.

DataBench EU Project

2018 - 2020

DataBench web

At the heart of DataBench is the goal to design a benchmarking process helping European organizations developing Big Data Technologies to reach for excellence and constantly improve their performance, by measuring their technology development activity against parameters of high business relevance.

DataBench will investigate existing Big Data benchmarking tools and projects, identify the main gaps and provide a robust set of metrics to compare technical results coming from those tools.

LEMO EU Project

2017 - 2019

LEMO web

Transport researchers and policy makers today face several challenges as they work to build efficient, safe, and sustainable transportation systems. From rising congestion to growing demand for public transit, the travel behaviour and transportation preferences of city dwellers are changing fast.

Leveraging Big Data to Manage Transport Operations (LeMO) project will address these issues by investigating the implications of the utilisation of such big data to enhance the economic sustainability and competitiveness of European transport sector.

The project will study and analyse big data in the European transport domain in particular with respect to five transport dimensions - mode, sector, technology, policy and evaluation.

RAIMA Project

2016

RAIMA web

Evaluating the latest Raima Database Manager (RDM) 14 using micro-benchmarks and custom benchmarks under Windows and Linux environments. Measuring and comparing the query execution performance of the different RDM modes.

FlashyDB DFG Project

2010-2012

FlashyDB web

Instrumented and performed multiple experiments with various benchmarks (TPC-B/C/H) to investigate the database performance (MySQL and PostrgeSQL) on Solid State Drives (SSDs).

Worked on the design and implementation of the Hybrid Page Layout (HPL) and its testing framework.

Education

Goethe University Frankfurt

Databases and Information Systems

2014 - 2019

Doctorate of Natural Sciences (Dr. rer. nat.) in Computer Science

Doctoral thesis: “Classifying, Evaluating and Advancing Big Data Benchmarks”

Thesis advisor: Roberto V. Zicari

Technical University of Darmstadt

Department of Computer Science

2012 - 2014

Master of Science in Distributed Software Systems

Master thesis: Benchmarking Hadoop Clusters: An Empirical Study

Thesis advisors: Alejandro Buchmann (TU Darmstadt) and Roberto V. Zicari (Goethe University Frankfurt)

Technical University of Darmstadt

Department of Computational Engineering

2003 - 2011

Bachelor of Science in Computational Engineering

Bachelor thesis: Analysis of Database Performance in Virtual Environments

Thesis advisors: Alejandro Buchmann (TU Darmstadt) and Ilia Petrov (TU Darmstadt)

Publications

Teaching Activities

Big Data Technologies

Hands-on Lab Summer Semester 2020 and Winter Semester 2019

Frankfurt Big Data Lab webpage

The hands-on lab will investigate the features and usability of emerging AI/ML tools focused on Fairness, Bias, Transparency, Explainability and similar Ethical aspects in AI.

The goal is to practically apply the tools in real use cases with data sets either provided by the tool vendors or developed by the teams. Based on their experience the participants will perform an assessment of the tools they use as well as feature comparison.

All outcomes of the investigations will be reported in the final presentation. In particular the tools that we look at are Google What-If, IBM AI Fairness 360, IBM AI Explainability 360, Captum PyTorch and MS InterpretML.

Big Data Technologies

Hands-on Lab Summer Semester 2019

Frankfurt Big Data Lab webpage

The goal of the course is to provide the students with practical hands-on experience with Big Data, Deep Learning, AI systems and new types of storage platforms and frameworks like Hadoop, Spark, Kubeflow, TensorFlow and Kuberenetes.

Students will have to choose one of the given topics, in teams of two students, and need to be actively participating at the weekly meetings.

The course is divided into two phases. In the first phase the student teams will setup, install and get to know the cloud environment (Google Cloud Platform) and the platform they selected to work with.

In the second phase, the teams will propose a realistic Big Data scenario using real data sets and implement it on the platform they setup in the first phase.

The final implementations and results will be presented (graded) at the end of the course in front of all students.

2nd Big Data and Data Science Workshop

3rd - 7th September 2018

Data Research Centre (DRC) of Campus Fryslân webpage

Teaching 5-day hands-on workshop on Big Data and Data Science in Drachten, Netherlands at the Data Research Centre (DRC) of Campus Fryslân.

Data Challenge 2018

Summer Semester 2018

Frankfurt Big Data Lab webpage

Supervisor for the Deutsche Bahn data challenges in “Smart Cities, Smart Life” and the Procter & Gamble (P&G) data challenges in “Smart Logistics, Smart Supply Chain”.

Big Data and Data Science 2017

Hands-on Lab Winter Semester 2017

Frankfurt Big Data Lab webpage

Focus on applying Big Data technologies in practice or stress testing them through benchmarks.

1st Big Data and Data Science Workshop

25th - 28th September 2017

Data Research Centre (DRC) of Campus Fryslân webpage

Teaching 4-day hands-on workshop on Big Data and Data Science at the Data Research Center Campus Fryslân, Leeuwarden, Netherlands at the Data Research Centre (DRC) of Campus Fryslân.

Data Science Tools Course at the University of Perugia

20th - 30th March 2017

Invited to teach a two weeks hands-on course on Data Science Tools (8CPs) as part of the new Master in Data Science at the University Perugia, Italy. The Master Course is composed of a mix of short lectures and practical hands-on labs in the following topics:

  • Introduction to Hadoop and the Hadoop Ecosystem: HDFS, YARN and MapReduce

  • Data Movement with Apache Sqoop and Apache Flume

  • Managing Data with Impala and Hive

  • Data Processing with Spark

  • Introduction to Spark MLlib and Spark SQL

  • Introduction to NoSQL and MongoDB

Data Challenges 2016

Hands-on Lab Winter Semester 2016

Frankfurt Big Data Lab webpage

Supervisor for the Deutsche Bahn Data Challenge: Mobility of the future & ING-DiBa Data Challenge: Future of Financial Data

Applying Big Data Technologies

Hands-on Lab Summer Semester 2016 and Winter Semester 2015

Frankfurt Big Data Lab webpage

Focus on applying Big Data technologies in practice or stress testing them through benchmarks.

Big Data Platforms

Hands-on Lab Summer Semester 2015

Frankfurt Big Data Lab webpage

Focus on covering the Hadoop architecture and the Hadoop ecosystem of tools. These technologies are at the foundation of the Big Data movement, and they facilitate scalable management and processing of vast quantities of data.

Big Data Analytics

Summer Semester 2014

Frankfurt Big Data Lab webpage

Focus on basic theoretical and practical techniques for extracting information from large datasets and data mining of massive datasets through practical applications in predictive analytics.

Activities & Services