Weaving Services and People on the World Wide Web

Irwin King is Associate Professor at the Web Intelligence and Social Computing Lab of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, China. He serves as a member of the Engineering Panel with the Research Grants Council (RGC), Hong Kong SAR Government; and is also currently serving as a Vice-President and Governing Board Member of the Asian Pacific Neural Network Assembly (APNNA). In addition, he is also actively involved in the education of students outside the classroom. For example, he has led several ACM Programming Contest Teams to the ACM ICPC World Finals since 2000. His research interests include machine learning, web intelligence & social computing, and multimedia processing.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates is VP of Research for Europe and Latin America, leading the Yahoo! Research labs at Barcelona, Spain and Santiago, Chile, and also supervising the lab in Haifa, Israel. Until 2005 he was the director of the Center for Web Research at the Department of Computer Science of the Engineering School of the University of Chile, and ICREA Professor and founder of the Web Research Group at the Dept. of Information and Communication Technologies of Univ. Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. He maintains ties with both mentioned universities as a part-time professor for the Ph.D. program. His research interests includes algorithms and data structures, information retrieval, web mining, text and multimedia databases, software and database visualization, and user interfaces.