ESSIR'03
Lecturers

    Keith van Rijsbergen

Lecture: Introduction to IR

Professor, and leader of the Information Retrieval Group, (http://ir.dcs.gla.ac.uk/) in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow.

Keith van Rijsbergen was born in Holland in 1943. He was educated in Holland, Indonesia, Namibia and Australia. He took a degree in mathematics at the University of Western Australia. As a graduate he spent two years tutoring in mathematics while studying computer science. In 1972 he completed a Ph.D. in computer science at Cambridge University. After almost three years of lecturing in information retrieval and artificial intelligence at Monash University he returned to the Cambridge Computer Laboratory 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 the Glasgow University where he is now.

Since about 1969 his research has been devoted to information retrieval, covering 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. 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 IR . He has been involved in a number of projects and working groups on IR, including Fermi (http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/fermi/), Miro(http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/miro/), Mira (http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/mira/)and the network of excellence Idomeneus (http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/idom/). He is a fellow of the IEE, BCS and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 1993 he was appointed Editor-in-Chief of The Computer Journal, an appointment he held until 2000. He was a member of the Advisory Committee (Beirat) for GMD in Germany from 1993 to 1996, and has served as a programme committee member and editorial board member of the major IR conferences and journals. He is a non-executive director of a start-up: Virtual Mirrors Ltd. He is also the author of a well-known book on Information Retrieval, which has recently been republished as a CD insert in Rik Belew's book published by CUP. He has recently (1999), together with Crestani and Lalmas, published a book entitled "Information Retrieval: Uncertainty and Logics".


email: keith@dcs.gla.ac.uk

    Doerd Hiemstra

Lecture: Advanced Models of IR

Djoerd Hiemstra is a lecturer at the Database Group of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Twente in the Netherlands. He wrote a Ph.D. thesis on language models for information retrieval.

email: hiemstra@cs.utwente.nl

    Fabio Crestani

Lecture: Logical Models of IR

Fabio Crestani holds a chair in Information Science at the Department of Computer and Information Sciences of the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. Before joining Strathclyde University in 2000, he held research fellowship positions at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory of the CLRC (UK), the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley (USA), and the University of Glasgow (UK). From 1992 to 1997, he was Assistant Professor at the University of Padova (Italy). He holds a degree in Statistics from the University of Padova, and an MSc and PhD in Computing Science from the University of Glasgow.

Fabio Crestani has co-edited 4 books and published over 80 refereed publications in the areas of information retrieval, hypermedia, and digital libraries. He has collaborated in a number of National and International research project and has been a member of the organizing and program committees of several conferences and workshops. More up-to-date information on Crestani's research interests, including online copies of his publications, can be found at the URL: http://www.cis.strath.ac.uk/~fabioc/.

email: f.crestani@cis.strath.ac.uk

    Maristella Agosti

Lecture: Web Retrieval

Maristella Agosti is Professor of Computer Science, of the Department of Information Engineering (DEI) and Faculty of Humanities, University of Padua, Italy. She is the group leader of the Information Management Systems (IMS) Research Group of the Department which deals with database systems, digital libraries, and information retrieval research.

Her research areas of interest are digital libraries, search engines, Web information retrieval, and evaluation of interactive retrieval systems. She has published more than 100 refereed articles on journals and conference proceedings, and authored or co-authored books and journal issues on hypertext and information retrieval, database design, and automatic construction of hypertexts.

She has been involved in several national and international research projects, in particular she has been the Domain Leader for Information Retrieval and Multimedia of the IDOMENEUS ESPRIT Network of Excellence No. 6606. She was a member of the Research Panel of the EU Information Engineering programme, Luxembourg. She has participated in the EEC Project JUKEBOX (LIB-JUKEBOX/4-1049), in the EEC Project EUROIEMASTER (IE2012), EEC ESPRIT Working Group No.20039 Mira, and in the European Space Agency (ESA) project on Semantic Network Inter-Operations (ESA-SN). She is co-ordinator of activities of the Department group, which is member of the DELOS Network of Excellence, IST-1999-12262.
She has launched the series of the European Summer School in Information Retrieval - ESSIR organising the first edition in Bressanone (Italy) in 1990; she has also participated in the organisation of third edition of ESSIR in Varenna (Italy) in 2000.
Director of the First DELOS International Summer School on Digital Library Technologies - ISDL 2001, Pisa (Italy), July 2001. Program Chair of 6th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL 2002), September 2002, Rome (Italy).
Program Committee member of several international conferences, including: ACM-SIGIR, CIKM, ACM-DL, ECDL. Member of the editorial boards of Information Processing & Management and Information Retrieval. Member of ACM , IEEE-Computer Society, AICA.

email: Maristella.Agosti@dei.unipd.it

    Massimo Melucci

Lecture: Web Retrieval

Massimo Melucci received a Ph. D. in Computer Engineering on 1996 and at present is Associate Professor at the University of Padua, Italy. Current research activities are on Web and cross-lingual information retrieval.

email: melo@dei.unipd.it

    Peter Ingwersen

Lecture: IR / Users

Peter Ingwersen graduated in Library and Information Studies at the Royal School of LIS in 1973. Until 1982 he lectured on information storage and retrieval, cataloguing and indexing theory, and carried out experimental research on cognitive aspects of user-intermediary-system interaction. From 1982-84 he was ESA Research Fellow at European Space Agency (ESA-IRS), Frascati, Italy. Back at the Royal School of Librarianship as associate professor from 1984, he worked with IRM and design of specialized information services and systems for industry.

He received his Ph.D. from Copenhagen Business School, Department of Informatics, 1991. He became head of MSc. programme from 1990, and from 1993 head of the Dept. of Information Retrieval Theory. As of January 2001 he is Research Professor at the Department of Information Studies at the School. He has served as visiting professor in the US, Japan, South Africa and Finland. He has served in several Esprit projects as expert consultant on design of knowledge-based IR interfaces and systems, and organized the 15th ACM-SIGIR Conference, 1992, as well as the 2nd international conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science, CoLIS, 1996. He is member of the editorial boards of several central LIS journals, like JASIST and IPM, received the Jason Farradane Award, 1993, and the New Jersey ASIS Award 1994 for his work on the cognitive approach to Information Retrieval. He currently supervises four research student projects as part of the TAPIR project (Text Access Potentials for interactive IR) on Polyrepresentative IR in structured documents, Small World Web structures, Thesaurus design by means of bibliometrics, and Metadata applications to IR.

email: pi@db.dk

    Yves Chiaramella

Lecture: Structured Documents

Yves Chiaramella is Professor in the Computer Science Department of Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble France. He is presently Director of the IMAG Institute, a federation of eight academic research laboratories in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics.

Since 1983, when he founded a research group in the domain of Information Retrieval (IR), he has been involved in several projects in this area, and active in promoting the domain of IR in Grenoble: in 1985 he organized the first RIAO conference, and in 1988 he was chairman of the first edition of the annual ACM-SIGIR conference held in France. His activity is now part of the CLIPS-IMAG laboratory, a Computer Science laboratory dedicated to Man-Machine Communication, which he founded in 1994 and led until 2000.

Among the IR projects in which Professor Yves Chiaramella has been involved are IOTA, a study about indexing and retrieving textual, structured documents, and more recently RIME, a project dedicated to multimedia information retrieval. In this latter domain, the research is mainly focussed on image and video indexing and retrieval. An other basic activity carried on by the research group to cope with the modeling of multimedia IR is the design and the experimentation of logic-based models. In this context Yves Chiaramella and his group have been involved in a number of EEC-funded international collaborations among which the MIRO working group dedicated to multimedia information retrieval, and FERMI, a basic research action dedicated to the study and the experimentation of logic-based IR models.

email: Yves.Chiaramella@imag.fr

    Jian-Yun Nie

Lecture: Multilingual IR

Jian-Yun Nie obtained his PhD in information retrieval (IR) in 1990 from Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France. From 1991 to 1997, he was an assistant professor in Département d'informatique et recherche opérationnelle, Université de Montréal. He is currently an associate professor in this same department. He leads several projects on information retrieval.

The research interests of Jian-Yun Nie cover several aspects of IR, including theoretical models, NLP-based IR, as well as cross-language and multilingual IR. He is also interested in data mining. His work on cross-language IR received the "Best Paper" award at ACM-SIGIR'99 conference.

Jian-Yun Nie has published over 70 papers in journals and conferences. He has been a member of the editorial board of the Journal "Information" between 1998-2001, and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Chinese Language and Computing since 2002. He has served as member of program committees for more than 25 international conferences and workshops since 2000.

email: nie@IRO.UMontreal.CA

    Stephen Robertson

Lecture: Multilingual IR

After a first degree in mathematics, Stephen Robertson took an MSc in Information Science at City University in 1968. Since then he has been primarily an IR researcher. A post in Aslib Research Department was followed by a research fellowship at University College London, where he obtained his PhD, and then a return to City in 1978. Here he was Head of the Department of Information Science for some years, and started the Centre for Interactive Systems Research. In 1998 he moved to Microsoft Research in Cambridge where he leads a group concerned with Information Retrieval and Analysis. He retains a part-time professorship at City.

In 1976 he was the author, with Karen Sparck Jones, of a probabilistic theory of retrieval which has been moderately influential. In the last decade, one of the vehicles for his research has been the experimental system Okapi. This has been aimed at developing models for IR (particularly probabilistic models), testing them, and developing evaluation methodology. Participation in successive rounds of TREC has demonstrated in a laboratory context the success of these models; other experiments take a more user-oriented view. At Microsoft he is involved in the construction of a new evaluation environment, and has been conducting extensive experiments in adaptive filtering.

He was given the Salton Award of the ACM SIGIR in 2000.

email: ser@microsoft.com

    Bruno Bachimont

Lecture: User Needs in Video

Bruno Bachimont is scientific manager of the research department in the Innovation department of INA, Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, France. Bruno Bachimont is also professor at the University of Compiègne (Université de Technologie de Compiègne) where he teaches computer science, logic and philosophy. Bruno Bachimont is a graduate of the french Ecole des Mines de Nancy (engineering school) and has received a PhD in computer Science from french university Paris 6 and also a PhD in Philosophy from the french school Ecole Polytechnique.

Bruno Bachimont was previously researcher in the field of artificial intelligence and medical information science at the Assistance Publique- Hôpitaux de Paris, which is made up of the 50 hospitals situated in Paris. Bruno Bachimont is the author of many technical and philosophical papers and has written a book on artificial intelligence and knowledge-based systems.

Bruno Bachimont is currently involved in projects related to audiovisual and multimedia indexing, using formalisms and theories coming from the knowledge representation paradigm (ontologies, conceptual graphs, description logic), the document paradigm (XML, XML-Schema, MPEG-7) and the audiovisual world.

email: bruno.bachimont@utc.fr

    Anne Guérin-Dugué

Lecture: Perception, Signal, Images

Pr. Anne Guérin-Dugué is a full professor at University Joseph Fourier at Grenoble and has joined the MRIM team at CLIPS-IMAG laboratory in 2001. Previously she was member of the Laboratory of Images and Signals. Her main research interests are scene analysis for image categorisation and image indexing by perceptive approaches, featureless data analysis for discrimination and classification.

email: Anne.Guerin@imag.fr

    Catherine Berrut

Lecture: Perception, Signal, Images

Catherine Berrut is Professor in the Polytech' Ingeneering school of Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble France. She is presently Deputy Director of the CLIPS (Communication langagière et Interaction Personne-Système) Laboratory. Since January 2003, she is heading the Information Retrieval Group MRIM at Grenoble.

Professor Catherine Berrut has been involved in several IR projects : RIME, dedicated to image and textual information retrieval. Her research focuses on multimedia indexing (images, video), and the personnalisation of information. She spent 6 months in Alan Smeaton's group in 2000, working on the Fishlar video system.

Catherine Berrut has been involved in a number of EEC-funded international collaborations among which the MIRO and MIRA working groups dedicated to multimedia information retrieval, FERMI, a basic research action dedicated to the study and the experimentation of logic-based IR models, TIPS, a european project dedicated to collaborative filtering. She is also involved in several national research projects : Annapurna funded by the French Ministry of Industry, RTP Bases de Données et d'Information funded by the CNRS. She founded a French working group on Indexing and Information Retrieval, funded by the CNRS.

web: http://clips.imag.fr/mrim/User/catherine.berrut

email: Catherine.Berrut@imag.fr

    Georges Quénot

Lecture: Models, Tools for Videos

Dr. Georges Quénot is Researcher at CNRS and joined the MRIM team of the CLIPS-IMAG Laboratory in the beginning of 1998. Previously, he has worked on computer architecture for machine perception (speech recognition and realtime image processing) at the LIMSI-CNRS and CREA-SP Laboratories. Since 1996 he works on Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval, especially for Video Documents.

His research activity is in the modelisation of the semantic content of video documents and on methods for extracting features from the image track. He has developed original techniques for motion analysis and characterization in video documents. His research has received funding from the National Network for Research on Telecommunications. He has published over 60 book chapters, journal and conference papers. He has assisted the European Commission as an evaluator or reviewer in the ESPRIT programmes.

web: http://clips.imag.fr/mrim/georges.quenot/

email: Georges.Quenot@imag.fr

    Alan Smeaton

Lecture: Video Searching and Browsing

Alan Smeaton is a full Professor of Computing at Dublin City University where he is Director of the Centre for Digital Video Processing and leads the Multimedia Information Retrieval Research Group. He is Dean of the Faculty of Computing and Mathematical Sciences since 1998 and was Head of the School of Computer Applications from January 1999 to December 2001. He holds the B.Sc., M.Sc. and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the National University of Ireland.

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 (spoken) and especially digital video. At present his major research funding is in the area of indexing and retrieval of digital video and in Digital Libraries, and has also received funded research in music IR and in web searching.

His research has received funding from the European Union under the ESPRIT, LTR, Information Engineering, Language Engineering, VALUE and Libraries programmes as well as from national funding agencies (National Software Directorate, Forbairt/Enterprise Ireland, Informatics Programme) and from industry. In 1994 he was the chair of the 17th ACM SIGIR Conference which he hosted in Dublin and in 2001 he hosted an NSF-DELOS Workshop on Personalisation and Recommender Systems, also in Dublin. He has co-edited a book on Hypertext and Information Retrieval (Kluwer) and has published over 80 book chapters, journal and conference papers. He is an Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Information Systems, an Associate Editor of the Kluwer Journal Information Retrieval and a member of the Editorial Boards of Information Processing and Management and of the Journal on Digital Libraries.

Professor Smeaton has graduated over twenty M.Sc. and PhD students. He has acted as examiner for PhD theses from the Universities of Glasgow (twice), Sheffield, Ulster (Jordanstown, twice), Sunderland, Trinity College (Dublin), RMIT (Melbourne), Tampere (Finland), ETH Zurich, City University (London, twice), Southampton and Robert Gordon University as well as been examiner for M.Sc. theses from 5 other Universities. He has been on the accreditation boards for new degree programs outside his own University and has also been on the peer review quality assessment panel for a University department outside his own University. He has assisted the European Commission as an evaluator or reviewer in the ESPRIT, LRE, Language Engineering, Information Engineering, MLAP, LTR, INCO-Copernicus and IST programmes as well as acting as reviewer for several specific projects.

Alan Smeaton is a member of the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society and is a Fellow of the Irish Computer Society.


email: asmeaton@compapp.dcu.ie