Enrique Alfonseca is the manager of the natural language understanding team in Google Research Zurich. Before that he held different positions in the ads quality and search quality teams working on ads relevance and web search ranking. He is also an instructor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) at Zurich. His research interests include Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval. He has co-authored more than sixty publications and has served as PC committee member and reviewer for some of the most important conferences in these areas, including ACL, NAACL, EACL, SIGIR, WWW and WSDM.

Charles Clarke is a Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, Canada. His research interests include information retrieval, web search, and text data mining. He has published on a wide range of topics, including papers related to question answering, XML, filesystem search, user interfaces, statistical natural language processing, and the evaluation of information retrieval systems. He was a Program Co-Chair of the 2007 ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; he was the General Co-Chair of SIGIR in 2003. He received his Ph.D. from Waterloo in 1996. From 1996 to 1999 he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto. He has previously held software development positions at a number of computer consulting and engineering firms. In 2006 he spent a sabbatical at Microsoft, where he was involved in the development of what is now the Bing search engine. He is a co-author of the book Information Retrieval: Implementing and Evaluating Search Engines, MIT Press, 2010.

Paul Clough is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield’s Information School. His research interests mainly revolve around developing technologies to assist people with accessing and managing information. Much of his research has focused on Information Retrieval (IR) of natural language texts within various domains and contexts, such as Multilingual Information Retrieval, Text-Based Image Retrieval, Geographic Information Retrieval and user- and system-oriented evaluation of IR systems. A theme of his research has been to create re-usable resources (corpora and test collections) for the wider research community. This has included co-organising evaluation tasks at international events, such as TREC (in the US), CLEF (in Europe) and FIRE (in India). Paul has written over 100 peer-reviewed publications in his research area and is co-author of "Multilingual Information Retrieval". He is currently Scientific Director for the EU-funded PATHS (Personalised Access To cultural Heritage Spaces), Principal Investigator on a project funded by AHRC and OCLC Inc. to develop a recommender system for Worldcat.org and Principal Investigator on a Google funded project to develop a taxonomy of search sessions. For more information see: http://ir.shef.ac.uk/cloughie/

W. Bruce Croft is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is also the Director of the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) which combines basic research with technology transfer to a variety of government and industry partners, and distributes search engine software through the Lemur project. His research interests are in many areas of information retrieval, including retrieval models, representation, query processing, and search architectures. He has published more than 250 articles on these topics and has an h-index of 79 according to Google Scholar. He is a Fellow of ACM and received the Gerard Salton Award from the ACM SIGIR in 2003.

Maarten de Rijke is full professor of Information Processing and Internet in the Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam. He holds MSc degrees in Philosophy and Mathematics (both cum laude), and a PhD in Theoretical Computer Science. He worked as a postdoc at CWI, before becoming a Warwick Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, UK. He joined the University of Amsterdam in 1998, and was appointed full professor in 2004. De Rijke leads the Information and Language Processing Systems group, one of the world's leading academic research groups in information retrieval. During the most recent computer science research assessment exercise, the group achieved maximal scores on all dimensions. His research focus is on intelligent information access, with projects on social media analytics, vertical search engines, machine learning for information retrieval, and semantic search. A Pionier personal innovational research incentives grant laureate (comparable to an advanced ERC grant), De Rijke has generated over 35MEuro in project funding. With an h-index of 45 he has published over 550 papers, published or edited over a dozen books, is (associate) editor for various journals and book series, and a current and former coordinator of retrieval evaluation tracks at TREC, CLEF and INEX. He is co-chair for SIGIR 2013 and general chair for ECIR 2014. He is the director of the University of Amsterdam's Intelligent Systems Lab (ISLA), its Center for Creation, Content and Technology (CCCT), and a board member for the Ad de Jonge Centrum voor Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsstudies. The retrieval and language technology developed by his research group is being used by organizations around the Netherlands and beyond, and has given rise to various spin-off initiatives.

Arjen P. de Vries is a tenured researcher at CWI leading the Interactive Information Retrieval research group, and a full professor (0.2 fte) in the area of multimedia data management at the Technical University of Delft. De Vries studies the intersection of information retrieval and databases. He has held general and programme chair positions at SIGIR 2007, CIKM 2011, ECIR 2012 and ECIR 2014. De Vries is a member of the TREC PC (who coordinated enterprise search and entity retrieval tracks), and a steering committee member of INEX (the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval). In November 2009, De Vries co-founded Spinque, a CWI spin-off that provides integrated access to any type of data, customized for information specialist or end user, aiming for better and transparent search results.

Norbert Fuhr is a a full professor in the Faculty of Engineering Sciences at the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany). His current research focuses on aspects of information retrieval (IR) such as document mining, distributed IR, interactive retrieval, and the user-oriented design of IR systems. He has published more than 200 papers in the fields or IR, databases and digital libraries. In 2012, he received the Gerard Salton Award of ACM-SIGIR.

Alexandros Karatzoglou is currently a Research Scientist and Marie Curie fellow at Telefónica Research in Barcelona. His research focuses on Machine Learning methods for Recommender Systems. He is currently working on several aspects of Recommendation such as Ranking algorithms, Context-awareness, Social Influence and Diversity and is implementing Recommender Systems for App discovery [http://Frappe.cc] and Social Networks [http://Tuenti.com]. His work on Recommender Systems has been awarded with two best paper awards at RecSys 2012 and ECML 2008. He serves as a Senior PC at Recsys 2013 and has been a PC member for KDD, ICML, NIPS, ECML. He received his Ph.D. in Machine Learning from the Vienna University of Technology while also being a frequent visitor at the Statistical Machine Learning group at NICTA in Canberra, Australia. He was a Postdoc at INSA de Rouen in France and a Lecturer at the University of Vienna. He is the author of kernlab, a well known Machine Learning package for R. He is also co-author of CoFiRank [http://www.cofirank.org], a collection of algorithms in C++ for Collaborative Ranking.

Dr. Georgios Paltoglou is a Lecturer at the School of Technology of the University of Wolverhampton and member of its Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group. His research interests include sentiment analysis and opinion mining, machine learning and information retrieval. He has over 15 journal publications with an average impact factor of 2.27 (including prestigious journals such as IP&M, IEEE TAC, JASIST and others), 1 book chapter, and over 18 publications in peer-reviewed conferences and workshops, some with particularly low acceptance rates, e.g., ECIR 2013 (16%), CIKM 2007 (17%). His publications have been cited over 400 times and he has an h-index and i10-index of 12.

Gabriella Pasi received a PhD in Computer Science at the Université de Rennes, France. She has been working at the National Council of Research in Italy till 2005. Actually she is Associate Professor at the Università Degli Studi di Milano Bicocca, Milano, Italy, where she leads the Information Retrieval Research Laboratory. Her research mainly focuses on modelling and development of techniques for flexible and personalised/contextual access to information, and on the problem of aggregation in search. She served as the Program Chair of several international conferences and workshops related to her research areas, and she was the chair or co-chair of several International events among which the IEEE / WIC / ACM Intenational Joint Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology, Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca, 15-18 September 2009, the PhD School on Web Information Retrieval (WebBar 2007), the Seventh International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems (FQAS 2006), the European Summer school in Information Retrieval (ESSIR 2000), and the annual track “Information Access and Retrieval” within the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. She has published more than 180 papers on International Journals and Books, and on the Proceeding of International Conferences, and she is member of the Editorial Board of the several International Journals.

About Tony Russell-Rose: I am founder and director of UXLabs, a research and design consultancy specialising in complex search and information access applications. Before founding UXLabs I was Manager of User Experience at Endeca and editor of the Endeca UI Design Pattern Library, an online resource dedicated to best practice in the design of search and discovery experiences. Prior to this I was technical lead at Reuters, specialising in advanced user interfaces for information access and search. And before Reuters I was R&D manager at Canon Research Centre Europe, where I led a team developing next generation information access products and services. Earlier professional experience includes a Royal Academy of Engineering fellowship at HP Labs working on speech interfaces for mobile devices, and a Short-term Research Fellowship at BT Labs working on intelligent agents for information retrieval. My academic qualifications include a PhD in artificial intelligence, an MSc in cognitive psychology and a first degree in engineering, majoring in human factors. I have published some 50+ scientific papers on search, user experience and text analytics, and am co-author of “Designing the Search Experience: the Information Architecture of Discovery“, published by Elsevier in 2012. I am currently vice-chair of the BCS Information Retrieval group and chair of the IEHF Human-Computer Interaction group. I also hold the position of Honorary Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Interactive Systems Research, City University, London. You can reach me via tgr AT uxlabs.co.uk. A somewhat more detailed version of my bio is available at LinkedIn.

Dr Michail Salampasis is an associate professor at the department of Informatics of the Alexander TEI of Thessaloniki. He holds a B.Sc. in Informatics (1993) and a Ph.D. in Computing (1997). He was candidate for the best PhD thesis award in UK. His main research interests are in applied and interdisciplinary studies in information science, including models and experiments related to information seeking behaviour, information seeking in large professional search systems, Web information seeking and evaluation, distributed information retrieval including source selection and results merging algorithms, search systems usability testing, information seeking using multiple strategies/interfaces. He currently is the coordinator of the Cost Action a research networking activity on “Multilingual and Multifaceted Interactive Information Access (MUMIA)” and a Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Vienna University of Technology leading a research program for Personalised Federated Patent Search Systems (PerFedPat). Michail Salampasis has published about 60 papers in refereed journals, conferences and book chapters in various fields of computing.

Milad Shokouhi is a Senior Applied Researcher working for Bing at Microsoft Research Cambridge. Before joining Microsoft, he did his PhD on federated search at RMIT University in 2007. Milad has published more than 30 papers and has served as PC memeber and reviewer for most top tier information retrieval conferences and journals. His research interests include query auto-completion, time-sensitive search, federated search and personalised information retrieval.

John Tait obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1983 for a thesis entitled “Automatic Summarising of English Text”. He subsequently followed a career in industry, mainly working on problems of large scale information retrieval and management, before taking up a post at the University of Sunderland in 1991, where he eventually became Professor of Intelligent Information Systems and Associate Dean of Computing And Technology, as well as leading the University of Sunderland Information Retrieval Group. In September 2007 he took up the post of Chief Scientific Officer of the Information Retrieval Facility, a not-for-profit institution dedicated to promoting research in large scale information retrieval. He now runs his own boutique consultancy, specialising in patent search and other areas of specialised information management. John is Chair of the BCS IRSG, a past Programme Committee chair of the ACM SIGIR conference (2005), an Associate Editor of ACM Transaction on Information Systems, joint Editor of Natural Language Engineering and has published over 100 refereed conference and journal papers. His current research focuses on problems of multi-lingual search and on patent retrieval.

Hugo Zaragoza is founding CEO at Websays, a start-up specializing in online reputation and opinion monitoring. Before this he worked in industrial research for over 10 years both at Yahoo! Research (where he led the Natural Language Retrieval group) and Microsoft Research. His research is at the frontier of machine learning and information retrieval, always pushing the boundaries of search engines and text mining technologies.