Winter School 2013

Important Dates

Registration Deadline (extended): 28th December 2012 Closed due to exahustion of available rooms

Notification for Student Grants: 8th January 2013

Winter School: 4th - 8th February 2013

Lecturers

  • Omar Alonso is a senior technical lead on Bing's social search team in Mountain View, CA. He has been working on social search and crowdsourcing for the last few years in industry and as a researcher applying these techniques for a diverse set of applications. He has published a number of articles on top conferences and participated in many workshops and meetups. His interest are information retrieval, temporal retrieval, human computation/crowdsourcing, evaluation, social search, and information visualization. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of California at Davis.
  • Krisztian Balog is an associate professor at the University of Stavanger. Previously, in 2011-2012, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Before that, he was a postdoc at the University of Amsterdam, where he received his PhD in Computer Science in 2008. His general research interests lie in the use and development of information retrieval, information extraction, and machine learning techniques for intelligent information access tasks. His current research concerns entity-oriented and semantic search. He has been a co-organizer of international workshops on entity-oriented search (at SIGIR 2011-2012) and of world-wide entity retrieval benchmarking efforts (the Entity track at TREC 2009-2011).
  • Sonia Bergamaschi is full professor at the "Enzo Ferrari" School of Engineering of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (UNIMORE), where she leads the "DBGROUP", i.e., the database research group (http://www.dbgroup.unimo.it/). From 2006 to 2010 she was the dean of the International Doctorate School in ICT at UniMORE, from 2011 to 2012 dean of the department of Information Engineering at UNIMORE. Her research activity has been mainly devoted to knowledge representation and management in the context of Intelligent Information Integration (I3) and Semantic Web. An I3 system, called MOMIS, which provides an integrated access to structured and semistructured data sources has been developed. On 2009 she founded the start-up "DATARIVER" for promoting an open source version of the data integration system MOMIS (http://www.datariver.it/). She coordinated and participated in many IST EU projects: "SEWASIE", "WINK", "STASIS", "FACILITATE" and was national coordinator of the MUR FIRB project "NeP4B". She has published more than two hundreds of international journals and conference papers and has served on the committees of international and national Database and AI conferences. For a detailed description of the research activity and of the developed systems see http://www.dbgroup.unimo.it/.
  • Martin Braschler holds the title of Professor ZFH and a position as lecturer at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Winterthur, where he heads the "Information Engineering" group. He studied computer science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH in Zurich, leading to a degree of MSc ETH, and received the degree of Dr. sc. from University of Neuchatel. He was one of the founders of the CLEF series of evaluation campaigns, and responsible for the technical coordination in its early years. The main research interests include multilingual information retrieval, IR application evaluation and enterprise search. Having previously served until 2004 as head of research and innovation at Eurospider Information Technology AG, Switzerland, a vendor of information retrieval solutions, he has been actively involved in the transfer of technologies stemming from evaluation campaigns to the commercial marketplace.
  • Fabio Crestani is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Informatics of the University of Lugano (USI) in Switzerland. Previously, in 2000-07, he was a professor at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, UK. Fabio is an internationally recognized researcher in Information Retrieval, Text Mining and Digital Libraries. In these areas he has published over two hundred refereed papers on both theoretical and experimental investigations. He is and has been involved in several National and International projects. Finally, he is currently the Editor in Chief of Information Processing and Management, one of premier journals in the area of Information Retrieval.
  • Nicola Ferro is assistant professor in Computer Science at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padua, Italy. His main research interests are digital libraries and archives, their architectures, interoperability, and evaluation, as well as multilingual information access and its evaluation. He is chair of the Steering Committee of CLEF (Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum) initiative and he coordinates the PROMISE FP7 network of excellence on experimental evaluation of multilingual and multimodal information access system. He has been program co-chair of the CLEF 2010 Conference on Multilingual and Multimodal Information Access Evaluation and served on the program committee of several conferences (among them SIGIR, ECIR, CIKM, ECDL, JCDL, WSDM). He has published papers on digital library architectures, interoperability, and services; multilingual information access and its experimental evaluation; the management of the scientific data produced during evaluation campaigns. He is member of ACM and IEEE.
  • Norbert Fuhr is a a full professor in the Faculty of Engineering Sciences at the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany). His current research focuses on aspects of information retrieval (IR) such as document mining, distributed IR, interactive retrieval, and the user-oriented design of IR systems. He has published more than 200 papers in the fields or IR, databases and digital libraries. In 2012, he received the Gerard Salton Award of ACM-SIGIR.
  • Francesco Guerra (http://www.dbgroup.unimo.it/~guerra/) s an assistant professor in computer Engineering at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. He received his PhD in information engineering at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in 2004. His main research interests include integration of heterogeneous information sources, ontologies, keyword-based search and the Semantic Web. He contributed to the development of MOMIS, a mediator based system for the intelligent integration of heterogeneous data sources. MOMIS has been also exploited in the Semantic Web, as tool for the creation and the integration of ontologies. His activity was also addressed to the development of techniques for the identification of "relevant values" among the ones contained in the domain of attributes of data sources. A prototype, called RELEVANT, combining several techniques developed in this field has been implemented. Recently, his research addressed issues related keyword-based search on structured data sources. In particular, he focused on techniques for dealing with data sources where only the structure is available. The techniques developed have been implemented in two prototypes, KEYMANTIC and KEYRY, based on an extension of the Hungarian Algorithm and on a Hidden Markov Model respectively. He was co-organizer of workshops and member of several Program Committees of conferences in the field of data management and semantic web. Recently, he was editor with R. De Virgilio and Y. Velegrakis of the book Semantic Search over the Web, Springer 2012.
  • Maurizio Lenzerini is a professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the Università di Roma La Sapienza, Italy, where he is currently leading a research group on Artificial Intelligence and Databases. His main research interests are in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Ontology languages, Semantic Data Integration, Database theory, and Service Modeling. His recent work is mainly oriented towards the use of Knowledge Representation and Automated Reasoning principles and techniques in Information System management, and in particular in information integration and service composition. He has authored over 250 papers published in leading international journals and conferences. He has served on the editorial boards of several international journals, and on the program committees of the most prestigious conferences in the areas of interest. He was the Chair of the Executive Committee of the ACM Symposium of Principles of Database Systems from 2010 to 2012. He is a Fellow of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI), a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and a member of The Academia Europaea - The Academy of Europe.
  • Peter Mika is a Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo!, based in Barcelona, Spain. Peter is working on the applications of semantic technology to Web search. He received his MSc and PhD in computer science (summa cum laude) from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is the author of the book 'Social Networks and the Semantic Web' (Springer, 2007). In 2008 he has been selected as one of "AI's Ten to Watch" by the editorial board of the IEEE Intelligent Systems journal. Peter is a regular speaker at both academic and technology conferences and serves on the advisory board of a number of public and private initiatives. He represents Yahoo! in the leadership of the schema.org collaboration with Google, Bing and Yandex.
  • 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).
  • Tetsuya Sakai received a Master's degree from Waseda University in 1993 and joined the Toshiba Corporate R&D Center in the same year. He received a Ph.D from Waseda University in 2000 for his work on information retrieval and filtering systems. From 2000 to 2001, he was a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, where he was supervised by late Karen Sparck Jones. In 2007, he became Director of the Natural Language Processing Laboratory at NewsWatch, Inc. He is currently a Lead Researcher at Microsoft Research Asia. He is a Programme Co-chair of NTCIR and is currently co-organising the NTCIR-10 1CLICK and INTENT tasks. He is a Programme Co-chair of ACM SIGIR 2013 and OAIR 2013. He also chairs the Asia Information Retrieval Societies (AIRS) Steering Committee, and was a general co-chair of AIRS 2009. He is on the editorial board of Information Retrieval the Journal and that of Information Processing and Management. He has received several awards in Japan, mostly from the Information Processing Society of Japan.
  • Ralf Schenkel is a senior researcher at the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik in Saarbrücken, Germany. His research interests include efficient and effective search on structured, semistructured, and unstructured data. Of partical interest are centralized and distributed knowledge sources as well as large-scale, long-term Web archiving. Ralf is deputy spokesperson of the German special interest group on IR and editor-in-chief of the "Datenbank-Spektrum", the German journal on databases and IR. He is co-chair of INEX, the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval. He has served on many program committees in DB and IR, including SIGIR, WSDM, WWW, ECIR, ICDE, SIGMOD, and VLDB.
  • Ian Soboroff is a computer scientist and head of the Retrieval Group at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The Retrieval Group organizes the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), the Text Analysis Conference (TAC), and the TREC Video Retrieval Evaluation (TRECVID). These are all large, community-based research workshops that drive the state-of-the-art in information retrieval, video search, web search, text summarization and other areas of information access. He has co-authored many publications in information retrieval evaluation, test collection building, text filtering, collaborative filtering, and intelligent software agents. His current research interests include building test collections for social media environments and nontraditional retrieval tasks.