Advanced Topics in Information Retrieval

Massimo Melucci has been an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Department of Information Engineering and Faculty of Statistics of the University of Padua, Italy since 2001. His research interests include information retrieval modeling and contextual search. He is also currently looking at the use of some theoretical instruments of quantum mechanics in information retrieval modeling. He has published more than 60 papers in these fields.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates is Vice-President of Yahoo! Research for Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, leading the labs in Barcelona, Spain and Santiago, Chile, as well as supervising the newer 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 at the Department of Technology of the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. He is (co-)author of the best-selling book “Modern Information Retrieval” as well as co-author of the 2nd edition of the “Handbook of Algorithms and Data Structures” and of more than 200 other publications. He has been awarded several prestigious prizes, and in 2003 he was the first computer scientist to be elected to the Chilean Academy of Sciences.