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 University of Padova, Italy
Professor Maristella Agosti is the leader of the Information Management Systems (IMS) Research Group at the Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova. Her research interests include Digital libraries, digital library management systems, digital library architectures, annotation of digital contents, hypertext Information Retrieval, Web link analysis for Information Retrieval, search engines, design and development of advanced services for archives and digital libraries, and Web log analysis. Maristella was the organiser of the 1st European Summer School in Information Retrieval (ESSIR 1990) in Bressanone, and the co-organiser of the 3rd ESSIR in Varenna, Italy. She has held various chaimanship positions in Italian as well as international research conferences and events. She has been in the editorial board of several scientific journals namely Information Processing & Management, Pergamon Press (since 1990), Information Retrieval, Kluwer Academic Publishers (since 1997), and International Journal on Digital Libraries (since 2005). |
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Fondazione Ugo Bordoni, Italy
Gianni Amati is a Senior Research Scientist at Fondazione Ugo Bordoni. His background is in mathematical logic and applications of Logic to Computer Science. He is known for his studies on the combination of probabilities, modalities and intuitionistic logics. His current interests include frequentist and parameter-free models for Information Retrieval and for query expansion. He initially developed the DFR (Divergence From Randomness) framework of the Terrier search engine. |
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 Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin, Germany
Bettina Berendt is Assistant Professor of Information Systems at Humboldt
University Berlin. Her research interests include Web Mining, in
particular Web Usage and Query Mining, Information Search and Ubiquitous
Information, Digital Libraries and Participatory Media, Personalisation
and Privacy, and Information Visualisation. |
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 Helsinki Institute of Information Technology, Finland
Dr. Wray Buntine is a Senior Research Scientist at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, HIIT, in the CoSCo (complex computation) group. With a background in probabilistic methods in computer science and statistical computation, his interests include probabilistic graphical models, machine learning and probabilistic methods for information access. He heads the ALVIS project, an EU STREP, where he is developing unsupervised topic modelling to assist information retrieval and access. The project is also pioneering peer-to-peer methods for web search, as well as distributed ranking algorithms. |
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 Microsoft Research Cambridge, U.K.
Dr. Nick Craswell is an associate researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK, in the Information Retrieval and Analysis Group.
His interests include Web search evaluation, mostly on enterprise-scale webs but also the World Wide Web. He built the VLC, VLC2, WT2g
and .GOV test collections, which have been made available to research groups around the world. Together David Hawking he coordinated the
TREC Web Track experiments. He is currently involved in the TREC Terabyte Track and Enterprise Track. He also works on effective Web search,
making use of information in pages, link structure and URL structure to generate more useful Web search results. |
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Universität Duisburg-Essen, Germany
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.
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 CSIRO ICT Centre, Australia
Dr. David Hawking is a researcher in the CSIRO ICT Centre, project leader of the Information Retrieval project responsible for the
Funnelback enterprise search engine, and Science Leader for the Information Retrieval area. His interests lie in the areas of Information Retrieval
and Web Search, particularly in search evaluation in realistic contexts, distributed search techniques, enterprise/intranet search,
improvement of search through exploitation of context, personal search and search efficiency. He is a member of the editorial board for
the Information Retrieval journal (INRT). He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Neuchatel and was recently awarded
the Chris Wallace prize for Computer Science at the Australasian Computer Science Week 2005. |
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 University of Twente, The Netherlands
Prof. dr. Theo Huibers MMC is Professor in Information Retrieval at the University of Twente and partner of Thaesis, a strategy consultancy firm. His background is in Computer Science. He has recently started to work on issues related to the information searching behavior of children, where he is using his expertise in information retrieval to develop approaches and technologies that will allow children to search the Internet. He is the chairman of the (Dutch) WGI, Vereniging Werkgemeenschap Informatiewetenschap (i.e., Society for Information Science). Among his published works are business books and articles on IR, (Dutch) Media and (Dutch) Software Companies. |
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 Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark
Peter Ingwersen is a professor at the Royal School of Library and Information Science, Copenhagen, in Information Retrieval. His research activities include Task-based IR; Cognitive & Contextual IR & Information Science theory; Relevance typology; and IR evaluation & design methods, incl. research framework development in IIR. His research also covers Research evaluation; Scientometric (citation) analysis; and Webometrics (Web-link analysis). He is co-chair of the IIiX2006 symposion and has organized ISSI, CoLIS and ACM-SIGIR conferences. Among his published works are books and articles on IR Interaction, Webometrics and, in particular, on contextual and integrative approaches to IR and Information Seeking research. |
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University of Tampere, Finland
Kal Järvelin is Academy Professor at the Department of Information Studies in the University of Tampere. His research interests include theory of information seeking and retrieval, query formulation, IR interfaces, cross-language IR, IR evaluation, and xml databases. He has served the IR community in program committees, as conference chair and program co-chair.
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Queen Mary University of London, U.K.
Prof. Mounia Lalmas is part of the Queen Mary Information Retrieval (QMIR) research group. Her research focuses on the development and evaluation of intelligent access to interactive heterogeneous and complex information repositories, and covering a wide range of domains such as Web, XML, and MPEG-7. She is also co-leader of the international evaluation initiative for content-oriented XML retrieval (INEX), and the ACM SIGIR Information Director. She has recently started to work on issues related to the Digital Divide and Fairtrade, where she is using her expertise in information retrieval to develop approaches and technologies that will allow people to make informed decisions.
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 David D. Lewis Consulting, LLC, U.S.A.
Dave Lewis is an entrepreneur and freelance computer scientist. He
works with business, government, and academic groups in the areas of
information retrieval, machine learning, natural language processing,
and data mining. He has also organised a number of major evaluations
and test collections in information retrieval and language processing.
He previously held research positions at AT&T Labs, Bell Labs, and the
University of Chicago, and is a Fellow of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science. |
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University of Glasgow, U.K.
Iadh Ounis is a Reader in the Department of Computing Science at the
University of Glasgow, which he joined as a Lecturer in 1999. He holds a
PhD degree from the University Joseph Fourier, Grenoble. He has been an
active researcher in information retrieval since 1994. His current
research focuses on parameters-free probabilistic IR Models, Intranet,
Enterprise, Web search and large-scale text retrieval systems building.
He has recently been coordinating the TREC Blog Track, the purpose of
which is to explore information seeking behavior in the blogsphere. He
is the principle investigator of the high-performance and scalable
Terrier search engine, the open source version of which has been
downloaded thousands of times since becoming available in November 2004. |
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Microsoft Research Cambridge /
City University, U.K.
Stephen Robertson is a researcher at the Microsoft Research Laboratory in Cambridge, UK. He retains a part-time professorship in the Department of Information Science which is part of the School of Informatics in the City University. He was full-time at City University from 1978 to 1998, and head of department from 1988 to 1996. He also started the Centre for Interactive Systems Research in the Department. His main research interests are in theories and models for information retrieval, specifically probabilistic models, the design and evaluation of IR systems, evaluation methods and optimization. Back in 1976, he was the author (with Karen Sparck Jones) of a probabilistic theory of relevance weighting, which has become quite well established in the field. An extension of that model (with Stephen Walker) led to the BM25 function for term weighting and document scoring, now used by many other research groups. Prof. Robertson is a fellow of Girton College, Cambridge; he was awarded the Tony Kent Strix award in 1998 and the Gerard Salton award in 2000.
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University of Strathclyde, U.K.
Ian Ruthven is a lecturer in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde. His research interests are Interactive Information Retrieval, formal methods for information-seeking, interfaces to information retrieval systems, interfaces to digital libraries, document summarisation, affective computing and information-seeking behaviours.
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University of Sheffield, U.K.
Dr. Mark Sanderson is a reader in information retrieval (IR) at the University of Sheffield. His research interests include web search engines, cross language IR (CLIR), summarisation, image retrieval, word sense ambiguity, personal and geographic search.
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 Dublin City University, Ireland
Alan Smeaton is a Professor of Computing and Founding Director of the Centre for Digital Video Processing at Dublin City University. He holds the B.Sc., M.Sc. and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the National University of Ireland. He is a Principal Investigator in the Science Foundation Ireland funded Adaptive Information Cluster, a cross-University grouping of more than 100 researchers working in the broad area of harvesting and using information from diverse sources. Alan has published more than 200 journal, book chapter and conference papers, mostly in the area of information retrieval from diverse media sources. He is strongly associated with the TRECVid evaluation benchmarking campaign, funded by ARDA and run by NIST, which he has been coordinating since it started in 2001. His current research activities are funded by SFI, EU FP6 projects, Enterprise Ireland, Microsoft Research, Google and by other industry partners.
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University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Maarten de Rijke is Professor of Information Processing and Internet
at the Intelligent Systems Lab Amsterdam of the University of
Amsterdam. Maarten has published over 350 papers. His current
research interests are in retrieving entities, answers, perspectives,
opinions, and experiences. He is the local organizer of SIGIR 2007
and co-founder of a recent startup on media analysis in dynamic web
data.
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University of Glasgow, U.K.
Keith van Rijsbergen is a professor and leader of the Information Retrieval Group in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. Since about 1969 his research has been devoted to information retrieval, covering both theoretical and experimental aspects. He has specified several theoretical models for information retrieval 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 and the application of Hilbert Space theory to content-based information retrieval.
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Google Research, U.S.A.
Dr. Trystan Upstill is a Senior Lead in Google's Core Search group in
Mountain View, CA. Dr. Upstill received his Ph.D. from the Australian
National University in IR and since 2004 has been putting his academic
experience to work in the real world (at Google). Dr. Upstill has been
instrumental in leveraging IR techniques in order to improve many of
Google's search products, with numerous patents currently under review.
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Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), The Netherlands
Dr. ir. Arjen de Vries is senior researcher in CWI's Database Architectures and Information Access theme (INS1). He leads the Information Access team that performs research into the integration of information retrieval and databases. He has worked on a variety of research topics, including (multimedia) information retrieval, collaborative filtering and personalised social media, enterprise search, database architecture and query processing, retrieval system evaluation, and ambient intelligence. His current research interest is the question how retrieval models should be adapted to the type of entity to be ranked, and how to limit the engineering effort involved in carrying out this adaptation. Arjen is a part-time associate professor in the area of multimedia data management at the Technical University of Delft. He is a member of ACM (SIGMOD and SIGIR), and a board member of the (Dutch) WGI, Vereniging Werkgemeenschap Informatiewetenschap (i.e., Society for Information Science).
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Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow