School Coordinator
Carol Peters is a researcher at the “Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione” of the Italian National Research Council. Her main research activities regard the development of multilingual access mechanisms for digital libraries and evaluation methodologies for cross-language information retrieval systems. Her publications are focused on the fields of computational lexicography and cross-language information retrieval. She was coordinator of the European Union Sixth Framework project MultiMatch: Multilingual/Multimedia Access to Cultural Heritage (www.multimatch.eu) and currently coordinates the EU Seventh Framework project TrebleCLEF: Evaluation, Best Practice and Collaboration for Multilingual Information Access and the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) a cross-language information retrieval system evaluation activity (clef.isti.cnr.it). She is member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Digital Libraries and of ERCIM News, magazine of the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics.

Martin Braschler holds the title of Professor ZFH and a position as lecturer at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Winterthur. He studied computer science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH in Zurich, leading to a degree of MSc ETH, and received the degree of Dr. sc. from University of Neuchatel in 2004. He has been active in IR research since 1997, with an emphasis on cross-language IR. A stay as visiting researcher at the National Institue of Standards and Technology NIST was the beginning of his involvement with CLIR evaluation, and he was responsible for the technical coordination of the core activities of the Cross Language Evaluation Forum CLEF in its early years. Aside from his academic record, he formerly was head of research and innovation at Eurospider Information Technology AG, a Swiss IR solution provider that develops cutting-edge IR technology for commercial applications.

Paul Clough is a Lecturer in Information Systems at the University of Sheffield. He is a member of the Information Retrieval Group and the Database Group. His main interests are Multimedia Information Retrieval (IR), Geographic IR, Multilingual IR and using Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies within IR applications. Paul is currently PI in three EU-funded projects: MultiMatch, Memoir and TrebleCLEF. The MultiMatch project aims to develop a multilingual search engine for accessing multimedia cultural heritage material. The Memoir project is investigating the use of technologies to improve information access of our personal memories. The TrebleCLEF project aims to promote evaluation, best practice and collaboration for multilingual information access. Recently, Paul has been an overall coordinator of an international evaluation campaign for image retrieval called ImageCLEF. Paul has published over 60 papers in refereed international journals and conferences on a variety of topics including information access, text reuse and evaluation. [http://ir.shef.ac.uk/cloughie/]

Franca Debole is a temporary researcher at the Institute of Information Science and Technologies one of the institute of the Italian National Research Council in Pisa, Italy. Her main research interests include text categorization and information retrieval; XML data structure; search engine technologies and multilingual information retrieval. In the last three years she was involved in a EU-funded projects MultiMatch project aims to develop a multilingual search engine for accessing CH material. At the moment she is working on a eContent plus project the European Film Gateway.

Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio is assistant professor at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padua, Italy. His main research interests are probabilistic models and visualization approaches for automated text categorization and information retrieval; evaluation of information access systems; log analysis of digital library systems for personalization of contents. He is also interested in the area of Multilingual Information Retrieval and in particular in the study of new strategies to compensate for limited linguistic resources for multi-language retrieval tasks.

Marcello Federico received the Laurea degree in Computer Science from University of Milan in 1987.
After he joined ITC-irst in Trento (Italy) where he has been a permanent researcher since 1991. He is currently co-head of the Human Language Technology research unit at Fondazione B. Kessler, formerly ITC-irst, and consulting professor at the University of Trento. His research interests include statistical machine translation, spoken language translation, statistical language modelling, information retrieval, and speech recognition. His group has participated in several evaluation campaigns on cross-language IR (CLEF) and MT (NIST, IWSLT) and has contributed to the developed of popular open source software, for language modeling (IRSTLM) and statistical machine translation (Moses).

Nicola Ferro is assistant professor in computer science at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padua, Italy. His main research interests are digital libraries and archives, their architectures and evaluation, and multilingual information access and its evaluation. He participates in national and international projects: SAPIR which deals with search in audio visual content using peer-to-peer information retrieval; TELplus which concerns the enhanchement of The European Library portal towards Europeana; TrebleCLEF which aims at providing best practices, collaboration, and evaluation for multilingual information access systems. He is involved in the coordination of the CLEF evaluation campaigns, and is co-organizing the Ad Hoc and Grid@CLEF tracks. He has published more than 50 papers on digital library architectures, interoperability, and services; multilingual information access and its experimental evaluation; the management of the scientific data produced during evaluation campaigns.

Julio Gonzalo is assistant professor at UNED (Madrid) and a member of the Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing research group (nlp.uned.es). His main research interest is Intelligent Search, including search engines, search assistants, Natural Language Processing Tools for Text Mining and Retrieval, and evaluation methodologies and metrics. He has published over 90 papers on topics such as Multilingual Information Access, Information Synthesis and Summarization, Semantic Networks and Semantic Search, Clustering and Visualization of Search Results, Web People Search, etc. Since 2001 he has been co-organizer of the iCLEF track (nlp.uned.es/iCLEF), focused on the interactive aspects of Cross-Language Information Access, and his experience at iCLEF will be the basis for his lecture. For more information visit http://nlp.uned.es/~julio

Anselmo Peñas is Associate Professor in the School of Computing, Distance Learning University of Spain, where he is researcher in the UNED NLP & IR Group since 1998. He obtained the PhD degree with special distinction and award in 2002 and also holds the Award of the Spanish Society for the Natural Language Processing. He has participated in several European projects such as EuroWordNet, CLEF and TrebleCLEF projects, News Engine Web Services project (NEWS), or the European Schools Treasury Browser project (ETB). A. Peñas has a book on Linguistic Techniques applied to Information Retrieval and more than 60 research papers on this topic, with special interest in multilingualism, interactivity and evaluation. Currently, he coordinates the Question Answering Track at CLEF.

Mark Sanderson is a Reader in Information Retrieval (IR) at the University of Sheffield. His research interests are in the
usability of searching systems, image retrieval, searching across different languages and evaluation of searching systems. Mark has raised over £4 million in research grant income to study these research areas and published his work extensively. A number of these publications have been cited over 100 times. He sits on the editorial board of four the major IR journals and is currently the programme co-chair of ACM SIGIR, the premier conference in the field. Along with Paul Clough, Mark was the co-founder of the highly successful imageCLEF track of CLEF. He taught tutorials on IR at ACM SIGIR in 2000 and 2001, for many year's on a Master course at "Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto" and at IR summer schools in Glasgow and Sydney.

Páraic Sheridan is the Scientific & Operations Manager at the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) at Dublin City University. He holds an M.Sc. degree in Computer Applications from Dublin City University and an M.S. degree in Computational Linguistics from Carnegie Mellon. He completed his doctoral work in 1998 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich with a dissertation on the topic of Cross-Language Information Retrieval. Dr. Sheridan then joined TextWise LLC, a start-up company in Syracuse, NY which was a spin-out from Syracuse University. At TextWise he worked on the CINDOR cross-language search system, which was commercialised and marketed by TextWise in the enterprise search space. Dr. Sheridan is now at CNGL, a research centre spanning four Irish universities and nine industrial partners and funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and industrial contributions. CNGL is pursuing an ambitious five year research programme to provide the foundation for the next generation of localisation and currently consists of over 100 researchers in areas of Language Technology, Digital Content Management, Localisation, and Systems Frameworks.