In late July, Prof Zicari had the pleasure of interviewing Gerhard Kress, who is heading Data Services globally for the Rail business, and is responsible for the Railigent platform at Siemens. We discussed innovation and the use of AI and Data-driven technologies in the transport sector, and specifically how the Siemens` Railigent platform is implemented.

“I think the biggest challenge is that in the rail business we have a very large set of old and country specific regulations that date back many decades. These regulations are meant to protect passengers, but some of them are not anymore fitting to the modern capabilities of technology and instead drive cost and slow innovation down dramatically.” – Gerhard Kress

Prof. Roberto V. Zicari is editor of ODBMS.ORG ()
ODBMS.ORG is designed to meet the fast-growing need for resources focusing on Big Data, Data Science, Analytical Data Platforms, Scalable Cloud platforms, NewSQL databases, NoSQL datastores, In-Memory Databases, and new approaches to concurrency control. The portal was created to serve software developers in the open source community or at commercial companies as well as faculty and students at educational and research institutions.

Roberto is Full Professor of Database and Information Systems at Frankfurt University. He was, for over 15 years, the representative of the OMG in Europe. Previously, Roberto served as associate professor at Politecnico di Milano, Italy; Visiting scientist at IBM Almaden Research Center, USA, the University of California at Berkeley, USA; Visiting professor at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, the National University of Mexico City, Mexico and the Copenhagen Business School, Danemark.