Evaluating Information Retrieval and Access Tasks

Tetsuya Sakai is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Waseda University, Japan. He is also a visiting professor at the National Institute of Informatics. He joined Toshiba in 1993 and obtained a Ph.D. from Waseda in 2000. In 2000 and 2001, he was supervised by the late Karen Sparck Jones at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, as a visiting researcher. In 2007, he joined NewsWatch, Inc. In 2009, he joined Microsoft Research Asia and the Waseda faculty in 2013. He was an associate dean (IT Strategies Division) there from 2015 to 2017, and department head from 2017 to 2019. He is the editor-in-chief of the Information Retrieval Journal (Springer) and an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS). He is a distinguished member of the ACM, and the current vice chair of the ACM SIGIR (July 2019 - June 2022). Douglas W. Oard is a professor in the College of Information Studies (Maryland's iSchool) and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). He holds affiliate appointments in Maryland's Computer Science Department and Maryland's Applied Mathematics, Statistics, and Scientific Computing program. He earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, and his B.A. and M.E.E. degrees in electrical engineering from Rice University. He is the current associate dean for faculty there. Previously, he was the associate dean for research in the College of Information Studies, and the director of the UMIACS Computational Linguistics and Information Processing (CLIP) laboratory.Noriko Kando is a professor in the Information-Society Research Division of the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, Japan, and also has been appointed as a professor in the Department of Informatics at the Graduate University of Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI), Japan. She initiated NTCIR in late 1997, an evaluation of information-access technologies such as information retrieval, summarization, question answering, and text mining, using various types of documents in East Asian languages and English, and has been a designer of various tasks and general co-chair of NTCIR. She received her Ph.D. from Keio University in library and information science in 1995 and has been teaching and conducting research at NII since 1994.