Keynote Talks


Ellen M. Voorhees

Ellen Voorhees is a Computer Scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Her primary responsibility at NIST is to manage the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) project [http://trec.nist.gov], a series of international workshops that defines methodology and builds infrastructure to enable large-scale evaluation of search technology for different tasks and across different media. TREC has featured tracks in areas such as web search, question answering, search within free-text fields of medical records, e-discovery, and expert-finding. Voorhees' research focuses on developing and validating appropriate evaluation schemes to measure system effectiveness for these kinds of tasks.

She received a B.Sc. in computer science from the Pennsylvania State University, and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Cornell University. Prior to joining NIST she was a Senior Member of Technical Staff at Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, NJ where her work on intelligent agents applied to information access resulted in three patents.

Voorhees is a Distinguished Scientist of the ACM where she is an active participant in its SIGIR (information retrieval) and SIGBio (bioinformatics, computational biology, and biomedical informatics) special interest groups. She was the general chair of the SIGIR 1997 conference and is on the editorial board of ACM TOIS (Transactions on Information Systems). She is also a member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). She has published numerous articles on information retrieval techniques and evaluation methodologies and is a frequent reviewer for conferences, journals, and funding proposals in the ares of information retrieval and natural language processing.

Ioannis (Yiannis) Kompatsiaris

Dr. Ioannis (Yiannis) Kompatsiaris is a Researcher Director at CERTH-ITI, the Head of Multimedia Knowledge and Social Media Analytics Laboratory, and Deputy Director of the Institute. His research interests include multimedia, big data and social media analytics, semantics, human computer interfaces (AR and BCI), eHealth, security and culture applications. He is the co-author of 129 papers in refereed journals, 46 book chapters, 8 patents and more than 420 papers in international conferences. Since 2001, Dr. Kompatsiaris has participated in 59 National and European research programs including direct collaboration with industry, in 15 of which he has been the Project Coordinator and in 41 the Principal Investigator. He has been the co-organizer of various international conferences and workshops and has served as a regular reviewer, associate and guest editor for a number of journals and conferences currently being an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and member of ACM.