Keith van Rijsbergen Peter Willett Norbert Fuhr Yves Chiaramella	Alan Smeaton Peter Schauble Peter Ingwersen Steve Robertson	Maristella Agosti Pier Giorgio Marchetti Ulrich Thiel

Keith van Rijsbergen

Keith van Rijsbergen was born in Holland in 1943. He was educated in Holland, Indonesia, Namibia and Australia. He took a degree in mathematics at the University of Western Australia. As a graduate he spent two years tutoring in mathematics while studying computer science. In 1972 he completed a Ph.D. in computer science at Cambridge University. After almost three years of lecturing in information retrieval and artificial intelligence at Monash University he returned to the Cambridge Computer Laboratory to hold a Royal Society Information Research Fellowship. In 1980 he was appointed to the chair of computer science at University College Dublin; from there he moved in 1986 to the Glasgow University where he is now.

Since about 1969 his research has been devoted to information retrieval, covering both theoretical and experimental aspects. He has specified several theoretical models for IR and seen some of them from the specification and prototype stage through to production. His current research is concerned with the design of appropriate logics to model the flow of information. He is also involved with the Esprit project FERMI concentrating on the design and specification of a logic for IR incorporating a notion of uncertainty. He is a member of the management board for IDOMENEUS, a network of excellence in IR and DB, and a participant in MIRO, a working group on multimedia information retrieval. A recent research research interest is automatic speech processing for IR. He is a fellow of the IEE and a member of the BCS. In 1993 he was appointed Editor-in-Chief of The Computer Journal. He is a member of the Advisory Committee (Beirat) for GMD in Germany. He is also the author of a well-known book on Information Retrieval.

Peter Willett

Peter Willett obtained an Honours degree in Chemistry from Exeter College, Oxford in 1975 and then went to the Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield where he obtained an MSc in Information Studies. Following doctoral and post-doctoral research on computer techniques for the processing of databases of chemical reactions, he joined the staff of the University as a Lecturer in Information Science in 1979 and was awarded a Personal Chair in 1991. He is a member of the British Computer Society and a Fellow of the Institute of Information Scientists, and was the 1993 recipient of the Skolnik Award of the American Chemical Society. He is a member of the advisory board of the Books Division of the American Chemical Society and of the editorial boards of the Journal of Documentation, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences, and SAR and QSAR in Environmental Research, and has been involved in the organisation of many national and international conferences in various aspects of information retrieval.

Professor Willett heads a large research group studying novel computational techniques for the storage and retrieval of information in textual, chemical and biochemical databases and has over 240 publications describing this work. His current interests include the development of non-Boolean searching techniques for textual databases, applications of automatic classification methods, the processing of 3-D chemical structure data to support research in drug discovery and protein engineering, and the use of parallel computer hardware for a wide range of applications in the general area of information retrieval.

Norbert Fuhr

Norbert Fuhr is professor in the computer science department of the University of Dortmund since 1991. He is well-known for his theoretical and experimental work on probabilistic IR models. His further research areas are the the integration of IR and database systems and multimedia retrieval.

Yves Chiaramella

Born in 1945, Yves Chiaramella obtained a diploma in 1969 at the Ecole Nationale Supe'rieure d'Inge'nieurs des Arts et Me'tiers. As a specialist by then in Automation, he decided to shift to the promising domain of Computer Science and obtained a Masters Thesis in this subject in Grenoble in 1970. From there he researched in the domain of fuzzy databases and applied his results to large genealogical databases in collaboration with the Department of Medical Biophysics and Genetics at the University of Utah (Salt Lake City). Assistant lecturer since 1973, lecturer since 1976, he then obtained his Doctorat d'Etat in Computer Science in 1981 at the Universite' Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, and has been Professor in Computer Science since 1983 at the same university. This same year he founded within the IMAG laboratory a research group dedicated to Information Retrieval and launched the IOTA project whose aims were the retrieval of structured, full-text documents which were based on noun-phrase indexing techniques and on the use of explicit knowledge and simple inference mechanisms. Since 1989 he has been Director of the Laboratoire de Ge'nie Informatique, and is now in the process of founding a new lab dedicated to Man-Machine Interaction and Natural Languages. He organised the first RIAO International Conference in 1985 in Grenoble, and was Chairman of the 1988 ACM-SIGIR International Conference also held in Grenoble. Yves Chiaramella has been on the SIGIR Program Committee, and also on several editorial boards of several journals: Information Processing and Management, the Journal of the American Society for Information Science, the Computer Journal, and Technique et Sciences de l'Informatique. His main interests in the domain of Information Retrieval are presently logic-based approaches to IR and their applications to Multimedia Information Retrieval (mainly text, images and graphics), and also the combination of Hypermedia and IRS approaches. Yves Chiaramella and most of the research group in Grenoble are now involved in several European research activities dedicated to IR: FERMI, a Basic Research Action, Miro, a Working Group, and IDOMENEUS, a network of Excellence .

Alan Smeaton

Alan Smeaton is a Senior Lecturer in Computing at Dublin City University where he teaches courses on Databases and Information Systems. He has a PhD degree in Computer Science from university College Dublin. He has been involved in the MINSTREL and SIMPR projects (ESPRIT) working on applications of NLP to information retrieval, and has also received funding from the CEC VALUE program for similar work. He is an Associate Editor of ACM TOIS, a member of the TREC program committee and chaired the SIGIR Conference in Dublin in 1994. He is currently working on the BORGES project under the CEC LIBRARIES program, applying NLP techniques to information filtering.

Peter Schauble

Born in Zurich, Switzerland. Study of Mathematics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich. From 1982 to 1984 technical staff member of the European Space Agency (ESA) in Darmstadt, FRG (orbit computation, visibility analysis, maintenance of a large program package for orbit computation). From 1984 to 1989 research and teaching assistant at the Department of Computer Science of ETH Zurich. January 1989: D.Sc. in Computer Science (Dr. sc. techn.). Visiting scientist at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Database Technology Department, Palo Alto, California. From 1991 to 1994 senior research associate and lecturer at the Department of Computer Science ETH Zurich. Since April 1994 assistant professor.

Peter Ingwersen

Peter Ingwersen is Head of Dept. of IR Theory at the Royal School of Librarianship, Denmark. He graduated in LIS in 1973 and received his doctorate degree in 1991 in Informatics from Copenhagen Business University.From 1976-82 he carried out experimental research on cognitive psychological aspects of processes concerned with user-intermediary-system interaction. From the mid-80s his R&D work has been concentrated on interface functionality modelling, cognitive aspects of IR and information science, and design of IR systems for state agencies. He has been research fellow at the European Space Agency, Information Retrieval Service (ESA-IRS) at frascati, 1982-84 and visiting professor at SCILS, Rutgers Univ. 1987. He has served as expert reviewer for the EEC, Esprit programme and organized the 15th ACM-Sigir Conference in Copenhagen, 1992. He is member of the editorial boards of Information Processing and Management and Journal of Documentation, and Fellow of LA, UK. He received the Jason Farradane Award, 1993, and the 1994 ASIS/NJ Distinguished Lectureship Award for his work on the cognitive approach to IR. His best known work is the book Information Retrieval Interaction, 1992.

Steve Robertson

From completing his MSc in Information Science at City University in 1968, he has been primarily an IR researcher. A post in Aslib Research Department was followed by a research fellowship at University College London, and then a return to City in 1978. He holds a personal chair, and is also currently Head of Department and joint Director of the Centre for Interactive Systems Research.

The Centre houses the experimental system Okapi, which has formed the focus of much of his research. This has been aimed at developing models for IR (particularly probabilistic models), testing them, and developing evaluation methodology. Participation in successive rounds of TREC has demonstrated in a laboratory context the success of these models; other experiments take a more user-oriented view.

Maristella Agosti

Institution
Department of Electronics and Informatics, University of Padova, Italy.

Position
Professor (Associate, with tenure).

Areas of research interest
hypertext information retrieval models; evaluation of hypertext information retrieval systems; automatic authoring of hypertext databases; multimedia information retrieval; networked information retrieval; network search engines; online public access catalogues (OPACs).

Research projects
SBN - Italian National Library Automation Project (1984-1991). Participation in the design and development of research prototypes of advanced information retrieval systems based on a two level hypermedia architectures (e.g. HYPERLINE of the European Space Agency). Project leader for the design and development of the Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) named DUO that serves the universities of the Veneto Region (in the North-East of Italy): Padova, Venice and Verona (1989-1992). Leader of the site research group of the project MULTIDATA of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) project on multimedia databases (1989-1994). Participation in RECORD, a distance learning Italian project (1992-1993). Domain Leader for Information Retrieval and Multimedia of the IDOMENEUS ESPRIT Network of Excellence No. 6606. Responsible of Subcontractor F for "Workpackage 4 - Design of prototype systems" of EEC Project JUKEBOX (LIB-JUKEBOX/4-1049) (1993).

Professional Activities
Chairman of the Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval of AICA, the Italian Computing Science Society (1984-1990). Vice-president of the University of Padova Committee for the design and management of the university library automation project (1988-1991). Expert in the Italian National Focus Point for international library automation projects. Secretary of the European Information Retrieval Specialist Group of CEPIS (CEPIS- EIRSG) (from the launch: 1992). Member of the Editorial Board of Information Processing and Management, Pergamon Press (from 1990); member of the Editorial Board of The Computer Journal, Oxford University Press (from 1990). Member of the Research Panel of the EC Information Engineering programme, Luxembourg (from 1993).

Pier Giorgio Marchetti

Pier Giorgio Marchetti, is working in the European Space Agency since 1986. He has been coordinating development and maintenence for the Agency's information retrieval system (EsaQuest of ESA-IRS). He has been responsible for the design and implementation of a new client/server architecture based on the ANSI Z39.50 standard for the access to geographically dispersed information systems. He is currently leading a project aiming at the definition and implementation of a new generalised architecture for information systems.

In cooperation with the University of Padova he has developed an hypertext model and interface for very large bibliographic databases (Hyperline). With the scientific contribution of Rutgers University (USA) he has designed an intelligent interface (BRAQUE) for browsing and searching of large document collections.

He got a "Laurea" in Electronic Engineering from the University of Rome in 1977. In 1978 has been junior project manager in the Radio Laboratory of Autovox Spa (a subsidiary of Motorola Inc.) working on microprocessor controlled phase locked loops. >From 1979 to 1985 he has been a researcher in "Fondazione Ugo Bordoni" in Rome. He was running research projects on digital radio communication for radio relay and satellite links. He has been involved in the SIRIO project and has run propagation and communication experiments with the ESA OTS satellite and with small receiving stations both in Italy and China.

Ulrich Thiel

Position
Head of the department MIND ("Multimedia INformation retrieval Dialogue techniques"), which is a research group within IPSI ("Integrated Publication and Inform ation Systems Institute") of the GMD Lecturer at Technische Hochschule Darmstadt

Current Research Base
Dr Thiel's primary research and development interests are in information retrieval, intelligent interfaces, hypertext, multimedia, discourse modeling, user modeling, knowledge representation, text analysis and generation. Current projects in MIND focus on cognitive information presentation, integration of speech generation into graphical interaction, intelligent retrieval based on abductive reasoning, cooperative dialogue management based on speech act theory and case based reasoning.

Experience in R&D
Dr Thiel received his M.S. (Diploma) in Computer Science and his Ph.D. degree in Information Science at Department of Computer Science, University of D ortmund, and the Department of Information Science, University of Konstanz, in 1 983 and 1990, respectively.

From 1983 to 1988 he was a researcher and lecturer at the Department of Informat ion Science, University of Konstanz. He was a member of the TOPIC/TOPOGRAPHIC project, which resulted in an operational prototype for semantic information retrieval for full texts.

Since 1990, he is Department Manager in GMD-IPSI.