Lecturers

Prof. Tiziana Catarci was born in Roma, November 6, 1961. Master degree in Engineering, University of Roma "La Sapienza", 1987. PhD in Computer Science, University of Roma "La Sapienza", 1992. Since 1987 she teaches courses in Computer Science at Italian universities. From 1987 to 1990, from 1990 to 1998, and from 1998 to 2000 she was research assistant, assistant professor and associate professor respectively at the University of Roma "La Sapienza", where she is now a full professor. Her main research interests are in theoretical and application oriented aspects of visual formalisms for databases, information visualization, database design, cooperative information systems, user interfaces, usability, digital libraries, data quality and Web access. On these topics she has published over 150 papers in leading journals and conferences and 20 books. Her contribution can be regarded as one of the first and most significant examples of deep analysis and formalization of the interaction between the user and the database, which takes in consideration both usability issues and language related aspects. With respect to applications, she has led or participated in various projects on visual query systems, usability studies and developed methodologies for database design. Particularly relevant are some European projects, including KIM, VENUS, FADIVA, LAURIN, SEWASIE,DELOS, Interop, WORKPAD, SM4All, aiming at investigating different aspects of interface design and human-computer interaction. Outside of academia, she has been a consultant to large (private and government) organisations. Dr. Catarci is regularly in the programming committees of the main database and human-computer interaction conferences and is associate editor of ACM SIGMOD Digital Symposium Collection (DiSC), VLDB Journal, World Wide Web Journal, and Journal of data Semantics. She has been the PC Co-chair of WISE 2003 and of ODBASE 2004, the Workshop co-chair of Interact 2005, and the tutorial co-chair of VLDB 2006. In 2008, she has been the Note Co-chair of the 2008 edition of the largest and most important conference on human-computer interaction, ACM CHI. In 2009 she is one of the Track Chairs of ICDE 2009. She has been the organizing chair of the 27th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB2001), has been the program co-chair of the Fifth IFIP Working Conference on Visual Database Systems (VDB5) and has been the program co-chair of the International Workshop on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI) in 1996 and is in the AVI steering committee. AVI is bringing together researchers in Human Computer Interaction and Databases since 1992. She has been guest co-editor of two special issues of the Journal of Visual Languages and Computing (on "Visual Query Languages"), of ACM SIGMOD Record (on "Information Visualization"), of Information Systems (on "Data quality" and on "Data and Service Integration"), and of the VLDB Journal (on "Metadata Management"). She is member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
   
Prof. Maria Francesca Costabile is full professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Bari, Italy, where she teaches human-computer interaction and other courses for the computer science curriculum. She has been visiting scientist in several foreign universities, primarily in USA and Germany. She received grants from several Italian and foreign organizations. Her current research interests are in multimodal and multimedia human-computer interaction, usability engineering, user experience, mobile and ubiquitous computing, end-user development, visual analytics. She has published over one hundred fifty papers in scientific journals, books and proceedings of international conferences, and edited six books, published by ACM Press and Springer.  Prof. Costabile is regularly in program committees of international conferences and workshops. She has been Program Co-Chair of CHI 2008 and of INTERACT 2005. She has been General Chair of the International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI is organized in cooperation of ACM SIGCHI) in 2004. She is in the Steering Committee of Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing Conference, organized every year in cooperation with IEEE. She is Chair of the third International Symposium on End-User Development (IS-EUD 2011). She is senior member of IEEE and member of ACM; she is a founding member of the Italian Chapter of ACM SIGCHI, and served as Chair from 1996 to 2000.
   
Prof. Maarten de Rijke is full professor of Information Processing and Internet in the Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam. He holds MSc degrees in Philosophy and Mathematics (both cum laude), and a PhD in Theoretical Computer Science. He worked as a postdoc at CWI, before becoming a Warwick Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, UK. He joined the University of Amsterdam in 1998, and was appointed full professor in 2004.
He leads the Information and Language Processing Systems group, one of the leading academic research groups in information retrieval in Europe. During the most recent computer science research assessment exercise, the group achieved maximal scores on all dimensions. De Rijke's current focus is on intelligent web information access, with projects on search and discovery for social media, vertical search engines, machine learning for information retrieval, semantic search and multilingual information.
A Pionier personal innovational research incentives grant laureate (comparable to an advanced ERC grant), De Rijke has generated over 15MEuro in project funding and has published close to 500 papers, has published or edited over a dozen books, is editor for various journals and book series, and a former coordinator of retrieval evaluation tracks at TREC, CLEF and INEX (Blog, Web, Question answering). He is general co-chair for the CLEF 2011 conference, the director of the University of Amsterdam's Intelligent Systems Lab (ISLA), its Information Science bachelor program and its Center for Creation, Content and Technology (CCCT).
   

 
Prof. Alan Dix is Professor of Computing at Lancaster University and researcher at Talis based in Birmingham, but, when not in Birmingham, Lancaster or elsewhere lives in Tiree a remote island of the west coast of Scotland. He has long hair, a beard and is the son of a carpenter, but thereafter all pretensions to saintliness end.
Alan began his career as a bearded mathematician at Cambridge, worked as a research scientist at the National Institute of Agricultural Engineering (lots of brightly painted tractors), a Cobol programmer for Cumbria County Council (lots of beige and brown ICL mainframes), then in 1984, thanks to Alvey, he became a bearded computer scientist. Since entering academia he worked for almost 10 years at York University before moving to become a Reader at Huddersfield in 1994, an Associate Dean of the School of Computing at Staffordshire University for two years (lots of meetings) and then Professor of Computing at Lancaster University. During all this, Alan was one of the founders and directors of two dotcom companies, aQtive (1998) and vfridge (2000) which, between them, attracted £850,000 of venture capital funding. He is also a director of LUBEL, the Lancaster University commercial exploitation company. In September 2010 he started working for Talis a semantic web company who, inter alia, provide the platform underlying the BBC and UK data.gov.uk open data initiatives.
As well as numerous articles on many aspects of human-computer interaction and related areas, Alan has written and edited several books including a big textbook on Human-Computer Interaction and a smaller textbook on Artificial Intelligence. He is currently completing a new book TouchIT on physicality and design. His interests range from formal methods to creativity, and a colleague and he are the co-inventors of intelligent lighting that is about to go into commercial production and is hoped will transform the nocturnal appearance of towns and cities across the world.
   
Donna Harman graduated from Cornell University as an Electrical Engineer, and started her career working with Professor Gerard Salton in the design and building of several test collections, including the first MEDLARS one.  Later work was concerned with searching large volumes of data on relatively small computers, starting with building the IRX system at the National Library of Medicine in 1987, and then the Citator/PRISE system at the National Institute of Standards and  Technology (NIST) in 1988.  In 1990 she was asked by DARPA to  put together a realistic test collection on the order of 2 gigabytes of text, and this test collection was used in the first Text REtrieval Conference (TREC).  TREC is now in its 20th year, and along with its sister evaluations such as CLEF, NTCIR, INEX, and FIRE, serves as a major testing ground for information retrieval algorithms. She received the 1999 Strix Award from the U.K Institute of Information Scientists for this effort.  Starting in 2000 she worked with Paul Over at NIST to form a new effort (DUC) to evaluate text  summarization, which has now been folded into the Text Analysis Conference (TAC), providing evaluation for several areas in NLP.
   
Alejandro (Alex) Jaimes is Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research where he manages the Social Media Engagement group and is the technical lead of the large-scale Spanish project CENIT Social Media, which consists of an industry consortium of 7 members. Dr. Jaimes is General Chair for ACM Multimedia 2013, he is the founder of the ACM Multimedia Interactive Art program, Industry Track chair for ACM RecSys 2010 and UMAP 2009, and panels chair for KDD 2009. He was program co-chair of ACM Multimedia 2008, co-editor of the IEEE Trans. on Multimedia Special issue on Integration of Context and Content for Multimedia Management (2008), and a founding member of the IEEE CS Task-force on Human-Centered Computing. His work has led to over 70 technical publications in international conferences and journals, and to numerous contributions to MPEG-7. He has been granted several patents, and serves in the program committee of several international conferences. He has been an invited speaker at ICME 2011 (panel on Social Media), Practitioner Web Analytics 2010, CIVR 2010, ECML-PKDD 2010 and KDD 2009 and (Industry tracks), ACM Recommender Systems 2008 (panel), DAGM 2008 (keynote), 2007 ICCV Workshop on HCI, and several others. Before joining Yahoo! Dr. Jaimes was a visiting professor at U. Carlos III in Madrid and founded and managed the User Modelling and Data Mining group at Telefonica Research. Prior to that Dr. Jaimes was Scienti?c Manager at IDIAP-EPFL (Switzerland), and was previously at Fuji Xerox (Japan), IBM TJ Watson (USA), IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory (Japan), Siemens Corporate Research (USA), and AT&T Bell Laboratories (USA). Dr. Jaimes received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (2003) and a M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia U. (1997) in NYC.
   
Prof. Kalervo Järvelin is Professor at the Dept. of Information Studies and Interactive Media, University of Tampere. He holds a PhD in Information Studies (1987) from the same university. He was Academy Professor, Academy of Finland in 2004 –2009.
Järvelin's research covers information seeking and retrieval, linguistic and conceptual methods in IR, and IR evaluation. He has coauthored over 250 scholarly publications and supervised sixteen doctoral dissertations. His H-index is 25 in Google Scholar and 12 in Web-Of-Science (September 2010). He has been a principal investigator of numerous research projects funded by EU, industry, and the Academy of Finland.
Järvelin has frequently served the ACM SIGIR Conferences as a program committee member (1992-2009), Conference Chair (2002) and Program Co-Chair (2004, 2006). He is an Associate Editor of Information Processing and Management (USA).
He has received the Finnish Computer Science Dissertation Award 1986; the ACM SIGIR 2000 Best Paper Award; the ECIR 2008 Best Paper Award; the IIiX 2010 Best Paper Award; and the Tony Kent Strix Award 2008 in recognition of an outstanding contribution to the field of information retrieval.
   
Dr. Gareth Jones is a Faculty Member at the School of Computing and a Principal Investigator with the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) at Dublin City University, Ireland. He holds B.Eng and PhD degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Bristol. Previously he worked at the University of Cambridge and the University of Exeter. In 1997 was a Toshiba Fellow at Toshiba Corporation Research and Development Centre Japan, and has held visiting positions at Carnegie Mellon University and at the National Institute of Informatics, Japan. His research interests are in diverse areas of information retrieval including spoken, image, video, multilingual. mobile, context-aware and personal search. His work has been supported by UK EPSRC, Science Foundation Ireland and the European Commission. He has published in excess of 250 papers describing this work including receiving several Best Paper Awards. He regularly reviews submission to leading international journals and serves on the programme committees of international conferences and specialist workshops in information retrieval, applied natural language processing, multimedia and human-computer interaction.  He was information retrieval track chair of ACM CIKM 2010, programme co-chair of ECIR 2011 and will serve as general co-chair of ACM SIGIR 2013 in Dublin. He has previously served as a track co-chair at CLEF from 2002-2009, he is currently a track co-chair for FIRE 2011, and in 2010 co-founded the MediaEval evaluation campaign.
   
Dr. Stéphane Marchand-Maillet received his PhD in Applied Mathematics in 1997 from Imperial Collecge. He has founded and is heading the Viper group (http://viper.unige.ch), part of the Computer Vision and Multimedia Lab  in the Department of Computer Science at University of Geneva. His research is directed towards multimedia Information Retrieval with emphasis on learning-based methods. He is interested in all aspects related to multimedia information mining and retrieval.
He has recently been appointed as Chair of the Technical Committee 12 of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR-TC12, ``Multimedia and Visual Information Systems'', http://www.iapr-tc12.org). He is the Swiss delegate for COST Action MUMIA (Multilingual and multifaceted interactive information access - http://www.mumia-network.eu/).
He has participated in the organization of several events. In particular, he was the general co-chair of the International Conference of the ACM-SIG on Information Retrieval in 2010 (ACM-SIGIR 2010, http://www.sigir2010.org). He was also the general co-chair of the ACM International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval (ACM-CIVR 2009, http://www.civr2009.org).
   
Prof. Silvia Miksch is Associate Professor  and head of the Information and Knowledge Engineering research group, Institute of Software Technology & Interactive Systems, Vienna University of Technology. From 2006 to 2010 she was professor and head of the Department of Information and Knowledge Engineering at Danube University Krems, Austria. In April 2010 she established the awarded Laura Bassi Centre of Expertise "CVAST – Center for Visual Analytics Science and Technology (Design, Interact & Explore)" funded by the Federal Ministry of Economy, Family and Youth of the Republic of Austria. Silvia has acquired, led, and has been involved in several national and international research projects. She has served on various program committees of international scientific conferences and was conference paper co-chair of the IEEE Conferences on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (IEEE VAST 2010, 2011) at VisWeek. She has more than 180 scientific publications and her main research interests are Information Visualization, Visual Analytics, Plan Management, and Time.
   
Prof. Stephen Robertson. First degree in mathematics from Cambridge; masters in information science from City University; doctorate from University College London, with BC Brookes (all a very long time ago now!). 
Researcher at Aslib for five years, then held a research fellowship at University College London. Began collaborations with Karen Sparck Jones and Nick Belkin at this time. Then returned to City University. Three months on a Fulbright at UC Berkeley (collaborated with Bill Cooper and Bill Maron). Started the Centre for Interactive Systems Research at City, and built a research group with a strong focus on the design and evaluation of information retrieval systems (including Micheline Beaulieu and Stephen Walker, and the Okapi system). Also head of department of information science during part of this time. Joined Microsoft Research Cambridge in 1998. 
Tony Kent STRIX award (Institute of Information Scientists) 1998. Gerard Salton Award (SIGIR) 2000. Fellow, Girton College Cambridge, 2003. Professor Emeritus, City University, 2010. 
   
        Prof. Giuseppe Santucci is associate professor at Department of Computer Science of Sapienza Università di Roma,
where he teaches courses on Java, Software Engineering, and Information Visualization (in English).
His main research activities concern user interfaces to databases, human computer interaction, and Information Visualization,
focusing on expressive power and topological properties of visual query languages for semantic data models, on user interfaces
development and assessment, on evaluation and quality aspects of Information Visualization and Visual Analytics.
On such topics he published more than 100 papers on international Journals and conferences.
   
Prof. Jacques Savoy is full Professor in Computer Science at University of Neuchatel (Switzerland).  J. Savoy received a Ph.D. in quantitative economics from the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) in 1987.  From 1987-92 he was on the faculty of Computer Science at the University of Montreal (Canada).  His research interests cover mainly natural language processing and particularly information retrieval for other languages than English (European, Asian, and Indian) as well as multilingual and cross-lingual information retrieval.  He participated from many years to various evaluations campaigns (CLEF, NTCIR and TREC) dealing with these questions. 
   
Elaine Toms is Chair in Information Science in the Information School, University of Sheffield where she heads the Information Retrieval Research Group. Prior to moving to Sheffield in 2011, she was Professor and Canada Research Chair in Management Informatics, and ran the iLab at the Faculty of Management, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. She was formerly an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto. Her research interests lie at the intersection of human computer interaction, information retrieval and the representation and presentation of information, focusing on improving search systems to support real-life work, and the evaluation of such systems.  Her special expertise which she brings to this course is the identification of user information needs and the subsequent map to system requirements. In addition, she has special expertise in user evaluations, and has conducted perhaps the largest human experiment in interactive IR that resulted in a data set of 400 participants (and not with Mechanical Turk). Her work has been funded by NSERC, SSHRC, OCLC, Heritage Canada, Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Canada Research Chairs Program. She was/is co-investigator with three Canadian national research networks: TAPoR, the Text Analysis Portal for Research; NECTAR, the Network for Effective Collaboration Through Advanced Research; and the National Centres of Excellence project, GRAND which involves graphics, animation and new media. She has over 100 scholarly publications in refereed journals and conference proceedings.
   
Prof. C. J. van Rijsbergen (Cornelis Joost van Rijsbergen) (born 1943) is a professor of computer science and the leader of the Glasgow Information Retrieval Group based at the University of Glasgow. He is one of the founders of modern Information Retrieval and the author of the seminal monograph Information Retrieval and of the textbook .
He was born in Rotterdam, and educated in Holland, Indonesia, Namibia and Australia. His first degree is in mathematics from the University of Western Australia, and in 1972 he completed a PhD in computer science at the University of Cambridge. He spent three years lecturing in information retrieval and artificial intelligence at Monash University before returning to Cambridge 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 Glasgow University. In 2003 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2004 he was awarded the Tony Kent Strix award. In 2006, he was awarded the Gerard Salton Award for Quantum haystacks. Since 2007 he is Chairman of the Scientific Board of the Information Retrieval Facility.
   
Prof. Vincent Patrick Wade is Professor and Head of Intelligent Systems in the School of Computer Science and Statistics, in Trinity College Dublin (TCD) University. He is also Deputy Director of CNGL, a world leading multi-institutional research centre focusing on multilingual, multi modal globalisation of digital content.  Vincent holds a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from University College Dublin, an MSc (by research) and PhD from Trinity College Dublin. In 2002 Vincent was awarded Fellowship of Trinity College (FTCD) for his contribution to research in the areas of knowledge management, web based personalisation and adaptive learning technologies. Vincent has led over twenty International research project funded under EU framework programme. He is Coordinator of the flagship EU research project CULTURA which is researching adaptive analysis and personalisation of multilingual cultural resources.  Vincent was a visiting scientist at IBM (2006-9) and holds patents in the area of personalisation and adaptive digital content. His twenty year research career has seen him author over two hundred and fifty scientific papers in peer reviewed research journals and international conferences and he has received seven ‘best paper' awards for in IEEE, ACM, and IFIP conferences. He has a H index is 24 (google scholar). In 2010 he received the European Award of Language Technology for the research and national deployment of an innovative, adaptive, immersive game called ‘The Language Trap' to enable informal learning of conversational German. (http://seriousgames.cs.tcd.ie). He regularly reviews for leading international journals and conferences and was Conference Co-Chair for ACM AH 2006, General Co-chair IEEE IM, and keynote speaker at UM 2009.  Vincent is a co-founder of ‘Empower The User' an innovative spinout company from TCD specialising in Adaptive Web based Simulation. He is currently founding a new spinout company called "Emizar Customer Solutions Ltd" which specialises in adaptive delivery of corporate, open web and user generated content for enterprise customer care.