Organisers
Keith van Rijsbergen (Honorary chair) is a professor at the Department of Computing Science. His research in Information Retrieval covers 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. He was the prime contractor for the Esprit working group Mira (Esprit Working Group: 20039) concentrating on the evaluation of interactive retrieval systems and was involved in many European funded initiatives such as MINSTREL, KWICK, SHAPE, IDOMENEUS, MIRO, FERMI. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Institution of Electrical Engineers, the BCS, the ACM and the Royal Academy of Engineering. His professional activities include editorial board member of many leading journals (Information Processing and Management, Information Systems, The Computer Journal). He is chairman of the scientific board for the Information Retrieval Facility in Vienna. He authored two classic books on information retrieval and co-authored a book entitled "Information Retrieval: Uncertainty and Logics".
(General chair) is a Professor of Knowledge Media at the
Knowledge Media Institute of
The Open University, a Honorary Professor (2009-2014) at the
Department of Computer Science,
University of Waikato, and used to be a Visiting Principal Research Fellow (2006-2009) at the
Department of Computing,
Imperial College London. During 1997 - 2006 he researched at Imperial College London under a number of posts ranging from Research Associate via a prestigious EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship (1999-2004) to a Readership in Multimedia and Information Systems (2005). In 2006 Stefan moved to the Open University.
During his research career he has built up a Multimedia and Information Systems team and is currently Principal Investigator for a European Integrated Project on audiovisual search engines. His group works on problems in image, video, music and text retrieval, visualisation of document sets and query languages. Stefan organised ECIR 2006 as general chair, co-chaired the SIGIR Multimedia IR workshops in 2003, 2005 and 2007 and a series of other workshops, has been co-general chair of ICTIR 2009 in Cambridge and is PC chair of IRFC 2010.
Udo Kruschwitz (Programme co-chair) is a lecturer in the Department of Computing and Electronic Systems at the University of Essex. He holds a diploma in Computer Science from the Humboldt Universitaet Berlin and was awarded a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Essex (2004). His main research interest is the interface between information retrieval and natural language processing. He has served on numerous programme committees for international conferences (and associated workshops) such as ECIR, SIGIR and RANLP. He was co-organiser of past workshops including CLUK and the ESRC Agenda Setting Workshop on Confidentiality as well as co-chair of the forthcoming Corpus Profiling Workshop at IiiX 2008. He has successfully led EPSRC and ESRC research projects and is currently investigator on two EPSRC projects and a joint university/industry KTP project which aims at turning NLP and IR research into practical commercial applications. Udo is the author of the monograph "Intelligent Document Retrieval: Exploiting Markup Structure", published in Springer's Information Retrieval series. He is a member of the BCS IRSG committee.
(Programme co-chair) is a lecturer at the School of Computing, at Dublin City University, having received a prestigious SFI Stokes Lectureship in 2007. He is also a faculty member of the Centre for Digital Video Processing at Dublin City University and a collaborating investigator on the new SFI funded CLARITY Centre for Science & Technology at Dublin City University and University College Dublin. In addition to his work at Dublin City University, he is an adjunct faculty member at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Tromso, Norway, with which he spends 20% of his time. Prior to 2008, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Centre for Digital Video Processing and the Adaptive Information Cluster, both at Dublin City University. His early research interests covered the application of linkage analysis techniques to web search, but this has broadened to cover the indexing and content-based retrieval of information in all media, text, image, audio and especially digital video, with a special focus on retrieval from mobile devices. In his early postdoc years, he was the developer of the search engines supporting many of the Físchlár digital video search demonstrator systems; more recently he has become involved in the area of Human Digital Memories and especially visual lifelogging technologies. He has published over fifty book chapters, journal articles and conference papers.
is currently a Senior Lecturer at the Knowledge Media Institute of The Open University, UK. She previously held the positions of Lecturer at the University of Exeter, Lecturer at the University of Reading, and Assistant Professor at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She received her PhD degree in 2004 from Cambridge University Engineering Department working on statistical models to spoken language understanding. Her early research focused on biomedical literature mining and microarray data analysis. Her current research interests lie in the integration of machine learning and natural language processing for sentiment analysis and information extraction from Web. She co-organized the IAPR Workshop on Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics (PRIB) 2007.
Thomas Roelleke (Workshops/Tutorials chair) is a researcher and lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. Thomas' research interest lies in the integration of database and information retrieval (IR) technologies, IR models, and probability theory. His research contributions include a probabilistic relational algebra, the relational Bayes, the probability of being informative, and derivations of retrieval models. Thomas' professional expertise ranges from research to knowledge transfer and management, and he is a director of a start-up on information management. He serves as a reviewer for various IR publication forums, co-organised the SIGIR 04 workshop on DB+IR, was a panelist at SIGMOD 05, and co-chaired the SIGIR 07 posters.
Gabriella Kazai (Poster/Demo chair) is an Associate Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, working in the Integrated Systems team on developing new designs and technologies for providing natural and effective use of computer technology. Her PhD work at Queen Mary, University of London covered the evaluation of XML Information Retrieval. Her current research combines elements from information retrieval, human computer interaction, digital libraries, and design. Her research interests lie in the general areas of information retrieval and information management, and include the topics of social information retrieval, information seeking behaviour and browsing, evaluation measures, domain-specific IR (e.g., book search), activity based computing, and personal digital libraries. Since 2007, she is organiser of the Book Track at the INEX evaluation initiative, which investigates full-text searching over digitized books and studies users' interactions with e-books. Gabriella also co-organised the BooksOnline'08 Workshop at CIKM 2008, and is co-general chair of ICTIR 2009 in Cambridge.
(Local organization chair) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University working principally on the PHAROS project in the areas of image analysis, multimedia annotation and content-based search. She completed her PhD at the University of Queensland, Australia in 2006 examining and developing tools for analysing and managing scientific multimedia data. After submitting her thesis, Suzanne held an 18 month postdoctoral fellowship within the European Network of Excellence, MUSCLE, examining hybrid approaches to signal analysis and image annotation, dividing her time between ISTI-CNR in Pisa, Italy and IBaI in Leipzig, Germany. Her research interests include multimedia semantics, image annotation, eScience applications, human-computer interactions and semantic web applications.
