Eugene Agichtein is an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics and Computer Science Department at Emory University, where he directs the Intelligent Information Access laboratory. Previously, Eugenewas a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Text Mining, Search, and Navigation group at Microsoft Research, working on text and web mining for information retrieval. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University in 2005 , and a B.S. in Engineering from The Cooper Union in 1998. Eugene is a recipient of the “Best Student Paper” award at the ICDE 2003 conference, and the “Best Paper Award” at the SIGMOD 2006 conference. Dr. Agichtein works on information extraction, text mining, and user behavior modeling for more effective information access, management, and discovery from large text datasets such as the web, social media, and scientific literature.

James G. Shanahan

Jimi has spent the last 20 years developing and researching cutting-edge information management systems to harness information retrieval, linguistics and machine learning. Prior to being an independent consultant, Jimi was Chief Scientist (and member of executive team) at Turn Inc. where he focused on the development and deployment of an online ad targeting system (CPA/CPC/CPM-based) in a principled and measured way that leveraged advanced statistical and machine learning techniques;These responsibilities included leveraging the entire reservoir of data assets in order to develop methods for identifying key optimizations, deploying relevant analytical tools and improving the user experience. Prior to joining Turn, Jimi was Principal Research Scientist at Clairvoyance Corporation where he led the Knowledge Discovery from Text Group. Before that he was a Research Scientist at Xerox Research Center Europe (XRCE), where, as a member of the Co-ordination Technologies Group, he developed Document Souls, a patented document-centric approach to information access. In the early 90s, he worked on the AI Team within the Mitsubishi Group in Tokyo. He has published six books and over 50 research publications in the area of machine learning and information processing. Jimi is General Chair for CIKM 2008. Jimi received his Ph.D. in engineering mathematics from the University of Bristol, U. K. and holds a bachelor of science degree in computer science from the University of Limerick, Ireland. He is a Marie Curie fellow and member of IEEE and ACM.

Evgeniy Gabrilovich

Evgeniy Gabrilovich is a Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research. His research interests include information retrieval, machine learning, and computational linguistics. He serves on the program committees of ACL-08:HLT, AAAI '08, JCDL '08, CIKM '08 and WWW '08, and in the past he served on the program committees of AAAI, EMNLP-CoNLL, COLING-ACL, served as a mentor at SIGIR '07, as well as reviewed papers for ACM TOIT, IP&M, JNLE, CACM, AAAI, AAMAS, WWW and CIKM. Evgeniy earned his MSc and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.