Keynote Speakers

Emine Yilmaz

Title: From Search Queries to Conversations in the Design of Information Retrieval and Access Systems

Bio: Emine Yilmaz is a Professor and Turing Fellow at University College London, Department of Computer Science. She also works as an Amazon Scholar for Amazon. Her research interests lie in the areas of information retrieval, natural language processing and applications of machine learning, probability and statistics. Her research has been supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), European Union Horizon 2020, Google, Elsevier and Bloomberg. Her work has received several awards, including the Karen Sparck Jones Award, a Google Faculty Research Award and a Bloomberg Data Science Research Award. She has previously served in various senior roles, including co-editor-in-chief for the Information Retrieval Journal, PC Chair for SIGIR and an elected member of the executive committee for ACM SIGIR.

Chengxiang Zhai

Title: I3A: An Intelligent Interactive Information Agent Model for Information Retrieval

Bio: ChengXiang Zhai is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor in Engineering of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests are in intelligent information retrieval, data mining, natural language processing, machine learning, and their applications. He has published over 300 papers in these areas and holds 6 patents. He served as Associate Editors for several journals (e.g., ACM TOIS, IPM, ACM TKDD, and ACM TIST), Program Co-Chairs of NAACL HLT'07, SIGIR'09, and WWW'15, and Conference Co-Chairs of CIKM'16, WSDM'18, and IEEE BigData'20. He is an ACM Fellow and a member of ACM SIGIR Academy. He received multiple awards, including ACM SIGIR Gerard Salton Award, ACM SIGIR Test of Time Paper Award (three times), the 2004 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, IBM Faculty Award, HP Innovation Research Award, Microsoft Beyond Search Research Award, UIUC Rose Award for Teaching Excellence, and UIUC Campus Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring.