ESSIR 2005

Prof. Fabio Crestani
University of Strathclyde, U.K.

Fabio Crestani holds a chair in Information Science at the Department of Computer and Information Sciences of the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. His research interest is design, implementation, and evaluation of advanced information access systems concentrating on hypermedia, information retrieval, information filtering, and digital libraries. Previously he held research fellowship positions at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory of the CLRC (UK), the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley (USA), University of Glasgow (UK), and was Assistant Professor at the University of Padova (Italy). He holds a degree in Statistics from the University of Padova, and a M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computing Science from the University of Glasgow.

Dr. Cathal Gurrin
Dublin City University, Ireland

Cathal Gurrin is a post-doctoral researcher working in the Centre for Digital Video Processing at Dublin City University (DCU). He obtained his PhD from DCU in 2002 for his work on developing techniques to support searching on very large internet-sized web collections. His current research interests include Video Retrieval from large video libries and image/photo retrieval, specifically the retrieval of personal photo collections. In addition, he is interested in large scale retrieval of WWW documents, and has recently been heavily involved in the development of a high-performance, scalable, distributed WWW search engine.

Dr. Monika Henzinger
EPFL, Switzerland

Monika Henzinger is a professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences, EPFL, in Lausanne. Until 2004 she was a director of research at Google. Before coming to Google, she was on the research staff of the Digital Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, California and on the faculty of the Computer Science departments at Cornell University and the University of Saarbruecken in Germany. She holds a Master degree in Computer Science from the University of Saarbruecken and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University.

Dr. Djoerd Hiemstra
University of Twente, The Netherlands

Djoerd Hiemstra is an assistant professor in the Database Group of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Twente. His research interests are multimedia databases, digital libraries, information retrieval models, cross-language information retrieval, and statistical language modeling.

Dr. Gareth Jones
Dublin City University, Ireland

Gareth Jones is a senior lecturer in the School of Computing and member of the Centre for Digital Video Processing, DCU. From 1993-96 he was a member of the Speech, Vision and Robotics Group, Department of Engineering and Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, working as a Research Associate on the Video Mail Retrieval using Voice (VMR) project. From 1996-2003 he was a Lecturer in Media Computing in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Exeter. From 1997-98 he was a Toshiba Fellow and engineer at the Toshiba Corporation Research and Development Centre in Kawasaki, Japan. His research interests focus primarily on information processing issues in Human-Computer Interaction, with the topics including spoken document retrieval, Asian language retrieval, cross-language information retrieval, speech recognition, natural language modeling, information visualisation, mobile computing, interaction with virtual worlds, and affective computing.

Dr. Mounia Lalmas
Queen Mary University of London, U.K.

Mounia Lalmas is a reader in the Queen Mary Information Retrieval (QMIR) research group. Prior to this, she was a Research Scientist at the University of Dortmund in 1998, a Lecturer from 1995 to 1997 and a Research Fellow from 1997 to 1998 at the University of Glasgow, where she received her PhD in 1996. Her research focuses on the development and evaluation of intelligent access to interactive heterogeneous and complex information repositories. She has applied uncertainty theories, like the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence, for the modelling of information retrieval tasks in an expressive and unified manner and covering a 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), a large-scale project with over 50 participating organizations worldwide.

Dr. Stefano Mizzaro
University of Udine, Italy

Stefano Mizzaro is an assistant professor at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science in University of Udine. His research interests are the theoretical and practical aspects of information retrieval, digital libraries and scholarly publishing, mobile and wireless devices, and natural language processing.

Dr. Noel Murphy
Dublin City University, Ireland

Noel Murphy is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Electronic Engineering, DCU, where he has fifteen years experience of teaching and programme development and management, at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. He is a member of the Centre for Digital Video Processing, DCU. His primary degree was in theoretical physics, and his postgraduate work was on Computer Vision. His research interests include image and video coding, 3-D imaging and visual perception. During the last decade he contributed to the development of the ITU-T H.263 and ISO MPEG-4 video-coding standards.

Dr. Noel E. O'Connor
Dublin City University, Ireland

Noel E. O'Connor is a lecturer in the School of Electronic Engineering in DCU, and is the Programme Chair of the B.Eng. in Digital Media Engineering undergraduate degree programme in the School. He is a member of the Centre for Digital Video Processing, DCU. His research interests are combining low-/mid- and high-level AV object features for enhanced video content indexing, AV scene-level classification for summarisation and event detection, object segmentation and tracking in generic video, pedestrian tracking and monitoring using 3-D vision techniques, traffic monitoring using computer audition techniques, multi-modal video analysis for safety/security applications, and low-power hardware for advanced video processing operations on mobile devices.

Prof. Maarten de Rijke
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Maarten de Rijke is a full professor in the University of Amsterdam and the leader of the Language and Inference Technology group within the university. His core research theme is intelligent information access to which he brings to bear ideas from information retrieval, applied natural language processing, and knowledge representation and reasoning.

Dr. Ian Ruthven
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.

Dr. Fabrizio Sebastiani
University of Padova, Italy

Fabrizio Sebastiani is an associate professor in the Department of Pure and Applied Mathematics, University of Padova. His research interests are information retrieval, machine learning, human language technology, with particular emphasis on text categorisation and its applications. Prior he worked as research scientist at the Department of Linguistics in the University of Pisa, and Institute of Information Science and Technologies (ISTI) in the Italian National Research Council (CNR).

Prof. Alan F. Smeaton
Dublin City University, Ireland

Prof. Alan F. Smeaton is a professor of Computing at Dublin City University, where he is Director of the Centre for Digital Video Processing. Previously he was Dean of the Faculty of Computing and Mathematical Sciences and Head of the School of Computing in DCU. His early research interests covered the application of natural language processing techniques to information retrieval (text) but this has broadened to cover the indexing and content-based retrieval of information in all media, text, image, audio and especially digital video. He holds the B.Sc., M.Sc. and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the National University of Ireland.

Prof. Barry Smyth
University College Dublin, Ireland

Barry Smyth is a professor and Head of the Department of Computer Science, University College Dublin. He holds the Digital Chair of Computer Science in UCD and also a co-founder, director, and Chief Technical Officer of ChangingWorlds Ltd. His research covers a broad set of topics within artificial intelligence including case-based reasoning, machine learning, user modeling and planning with particular focus on so-called personalization techniques, which looks at ways of combining ideas from these areas to develop information systems that automatically learn about, and adapt to, the needs of individual users.

Prof. Keith van Rijsbergen
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.