Fabio Crestani

Academic Staff

Professor Fabio Crestani arrived at the University of Lugano in January 2007 from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. Fabio has been working in IR and Digital Libraries for over 20 years. He is currently working on: probabilistic and logic-based models of IR; distributed IR; information analysis and access across media; text mining of news, blog and police archives for behavioural, geographical and temporal analysis

Monica Landoni

Academic Staff

Monica's research interests are in the broad areas of Human Computer Interaction, Digital Libraries and Interactive Information Retrieval. In particular she has been actively exploring how e-books should be designed and evaluated by focusing on different readers and reading types. Monica has also been proposing and evaluating novel interfaces for Interactive Information Retrieval systems including Web IR

Leandro S. Guedes

Postdoc

Leandro's research interests are in the broad areas of Human-Computer Interaction, Information Visualization, User Experience, and Accessibility. He is doing his PhD at the Project BEST: Beyond Screen readers and Alt Text - Designing Multisensory Alternative to Text for Different Reading Abilities. The project explores how technology can support different forms of reading and the sense-making of text and multimedia content. Also, there is Muses (Multisensory story-telling), a sub-project that will involve adults with mild cognitive disabilities as visitors in a museum.

Sveva Valguarnera

Postdoc

Irene Zanardi

Research Student

Irene has been a PhD student in the LUXIA group since May 2022. Her work focuses on understanding how gender is inscribed in technology and how we can use technology as a moral prompt to initiate discussions on gender stereotypes and biases with children

Alessandro Consentino

Research Student

Alessandro is a first year PhD student who works on IR and Digital Libraries. Alessandro's research interests lies in the fields of Information retrieval, Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Graphs. He is doing his PhD at the Project ord47: Open research data for the 7th art. The main objective of this project is to provide a methodological approach to the creation of ORD for the critique and analysis of cinematography. The approach is based on the use of ontologies and linked open data to provide semantically rich descriptions of the cataloged material. It will be used the extensive material available in the archives of the Locarno Film Festival, the RSI Radiotelevisione Svizzera at Lugano and the Cinémathèque Suisse at Lausanne.

Navdeep Singh Bedi

Research Student

Navdeep is a first year PhD student who works in the field of NLP, Conversational AI and IR at USI, IDSIA.

Lili Lu

Research Student

Lili is the first year PhD. She is interested in conversational information seeking and LLMs.

Michal Burgunder

Research Student

Michał’s interest include mathematics, creative writing and how they are combined in the field of computer science. He is a first year PhD student working on stylometrics within novels & poetry, while pursing his creative writing interests. Having written a several pieces of longer fiction & non-fiction, his PhD combines both of his interests to measure, improve and understand writing style.

Maryam Mousavi

Research Student

Maryam, a first-year PhD student, exploring natural language processing and information retrieval. She's focused on ensuring fairness and mitigating bias in conversational information retrieval systems.

Diletta Micol Tobia

Research Student

Diletta is a first year PhD student at Luxia lab, working on Child Information Retrival. Her work focuses on creating a theoretical framework to extend the Search-as-learning paradigm to children in primary school classroom, fostering their overall learning experience.

Ivan Sekulić

2019-24

Ivan is a first year PhD student who works on Conversational Information Retrieval. His interests include, but are not limited to, utilizing context in conversational systems, tackling multi-turn conversations for information seeking, and neural approaches to information retrieval.

Manajit Chakraborty

2017-24

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Esteban A. Ríssola

2017-21

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Maram Barifah

2015-21

My research interests are in the areas of Human-Computer Interactions, Interactive IR evaluation in particular digital libraries, User Modelling and information seeking behaviour. The aim of my Phd project is to build real user profiles by capturing information seeking behaviour through user studies in order to build more realistic user simulations. The project involves conducting different users studies, analysing users behaviour in relation to various information seeking behaviour factors and generating personas in the digital library context. Another sub-project we are working on is the predicating the user behaviour of kiosk interface based on the logged behaviour of the users

Mohammad Aliannejadi

2015-19

My main research activity is in Mobile Information Retrieval. I am involved in RelMobIR project in which the main emphasis is on combination of different relevance criteria for mobile information retrieval. Some of the relevance criteria are topical, temporal, geographic, and etc. Prior to that, I have worked on Spoken Language Understanding in discriminative frameworks such as CRF both in supervised and semi-supervised manner

Seyed Ali Bahreinian

2015-19

My research interests include Information retrieval, Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Graphs

Anastasia Giachanou

2014-18

My general research interests are in information retrieval, text mining and topic modelling. I am currently working on temporal opinion mining and sentiment analysis in social networks with special focus on Twitter. Previously I have worked on patent retrieval and distributed information retrieval. For more information visit my personal homepage.

Ida Mele

2016-17

My research interests lie in the fields of information retrieval, web mining, and social media. Currently, I am working on topic mining in asynchronous and heterogeneous streams of text. I have also worked on optimization of information-retrieval systems, recommendation algorithms, crowdsourcing, and analysis of the privacy risks that may arise from users' online activities. For more information, please visit my webpage.

Marco Pasch

2009-17

Morgan Harvey

2014-15

>My current research interests revolve around developing systems allowing people to effectively model and utilise the data sources they interact with every day. I received my PhD in 2011 from the University of Strathclyde under the supervision of Ian Ruthven. The thesis research focused on modeling and exploiting information from web social interactions such as tagging and product ratings. I worked as a post-doc researcher in the Artificial Intelligence Research Group at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg where I was involved in a number of projects in the broader fields of information science and machine learning. This included investigating how people search and re-find information in email clients and how systems can be developed to improve healthcare by understanding exercise habits and nutritional needs

Giacomo Inches

2008-14

My research is focused on short documents analysis using IR, text mining and machine learning techniques based on user generated contents like twitter, chat logs, sms and police report archives. I worked on the SNF ChatMiner project. In prior scientific work I investigated the field of images classification and I also worked in the field of database systems (RIA, web engineering)

Luca Colombo

2010-2014

My main research interests are HCI and e-publishing. I'm also interested in design and digital typography (I worked on a thesis about web typography and on-screen-texts legibility). I'm have also worked on HEBE project

Parvaz Mahdabi

2010-14

My research activity is focused on the design of new interactive systems for patent search to ease and support users in searching and browsing among e-patents. The emphasis is placed on improving the interactivity and usability of patent search systems. Previously, I have worked on evolutionary algorithms inspired from quantum computing principles

Ilya Markov

2008-14

I finished my PhD on Uncertainty in Distributed Information Retrieval at the University of Lugano under the supervision of Prof. Fabio Crestani on January 31, 2014. Currently, I am a postdoctoral researcher and SNF fellow at the University of Amsterdam, Information and Language Processing Systems group, collaborating with Prof. Maarten de Rijke

Andrei Rikitianskii

2013-14

My general research interests are in Information retrieval, text mining and Machine learning. I'm also interested in soft computing techniques such as evolutionary algorithms and Swarm intelligence and their application in feature selection. I'm currently working on opinion mining and sentiment analysis in social networks with special focus on blog

Az Azrinudin Alidin

2008-13

My research interests are in mobile information retrieval and context based information retrieval. My current research is focused on delivering "the right information to the right user at the right time and place", which deals with identifying user contexts and presented information through mobile application

Mostafa Keikha

2007-12

My main research interests are Text Mining, Information Retrieval, Graph-based Data Mining, Uncertainty Theories and Combination of Evidences Theories

Shima Gerani

2008-2012

My general research interests are in Information retrieval, text mining and Machine learning. I'm also interested in soft computing techniques such as evolutionary algorithms and Swarm intelligence and their application in feature selection. I'm currently working on opinion mining and sentiment analysis in social networks with special focus on blog

Robert Gwadera

2008-10

My research interests revolve around data mining, text mining, machine learning and databases

Mark Carman

2007-10

I arrived in Lugano to start a postdoc after studying in Trento (at IRST) and Los Angeles (at ISI). My research interests in information retrieval include opinion detection, topic modeling, distributed IR and personalization with particular emphasis on applications in blog search, tag data and social network analysis. In the past I worked extensively in data integration and schema matching, automated planning and autonomic computing

Saeed Rahmani

2017

Hossein A. Rahmani is a master's student at the University of Zanjan, Iran. His research focuses on Recommender System and Information Retrieval and mainly on Point-of-Interest recommendation.

Dimitrios Rafailidis

2017

Dimitrios Rafailidis received his B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Informatics of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in 2005, 2007 and 2011, respectively. He has worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at ITI-CERTH, in the EC-funded projects I-SEARCH (FP7/ICT-STREP) and CUBRIK (FP7/ICT-IP) from June 2011 to December 2013. In 2014, he was awarded an excellence grant for postdoctoral researchers in «Multimedia Big Data and Cloud Computing» from the Aristotle University. Also, in 2015 he was awarded an excellence grant for new researchers from UCY. Currently, he is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Computer Science Department of University of Mons in Belgium. His main research interests include Multimedia Information Retrieval, Social Media Mining, Recommender Systems and Big Data Platforms

Kasturi Dewi Varathan

2016

Kasturi Dewi Varathan, PhD., is currently a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Computer Science & Information Technology, University of Malaya, Malaysia. Her research focus is in the field of Knowledge Representation and Information Retrieval mainly on sentiment analysis and opinion mining in social media

David Losada

2015

Dr. David Losada is an associate professor at University Santiago de Compostela, Spain. His research focus on Information Retrieval and mainly on Language Modeling, IR Evaluation and Opinion Mining

Javier Parapar

2010

Javier Parapar is a Ph.D. Student in the Information Retrieval Lab at the Department of Computer Science of the University of a A Coruña, Spain. His research interests comprise but are not limited to: clustering and cluster based retrieval, blog and news search, document processing and engineering, text summarization and retrieval over degraded information

Elena Sivogolovko

2010

My research interests is data mining and clustering. Clustering is a big research area and I have experience in such part as cluster validity, text clustering, stream clustering, image clustering and fuzzy clustering. Information Management Research Group (University of St.Petersburg).

Daria Bogdanova

2010

My research interests are primarily in Natural Language Processing. In particular, I work on Figurative Language Detection, Word Sense Disambiguation and Authorship Attribution. Information Management Research Group (University of St.Petersburg)

Andrea Basso

2008

Andrea was Visiting Professor at the Faculty. He is collaborating with the group on context-aware and multimedia information retrieval. He is Senior Research at AT&T Research Labs, Midtown USA and a frequent visitor to the group

BEST

Beyond Screen readers and Alt Text
Designing Multisensory Alternative to Text for Different Reading Abilitiess

Project BEST explores how technology can support different forms of reading and sense making of text and multimedia content via two sub-projects: EPPics (Enhanced Personalised Picture Stories) and Muses (Multisensory story-telling).
EPPics engages as co-designers pre-school children and teachers in a collaborative design approach for technology to foster pre-reading skills.
Muses involves users with mild cognitive disabilities together with their care givers and educators in collaborative critical design of tools for supporting reading.

• Funding Agency: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
• Starting date: September 2019
• Duration: 48 months

ReMO

Researcher Mental Healths

ReMO will focus on wellbeing and mental health within academia, a theme of strategic importance for the European Research Area. Previous research shows that low levels of wellbeing and mental health problems have a negative impact on individual, team and organizational performance, triggering significant costs. ReMO wants to address these limitations using a threefold approach: (1) We aim at developing a conceptual framework and tools that are tailored to the academic context taking into account the specifics and challenges of academia and academic work; (2) We take a multilevel perspective on problems and problem generating mechanisms, but also on positive organizational behavior in support of meaningful work and wellbeing; (3) We use a diversity of methods with short feedback loops between theory and practice. The proposers of ReMO have an international mix of scientific knowledge and practice on researcher mental health and a much needed interdisciplinary (e.g. psychology, sociology, business administration), multilevel (individual, organizational, system) and intercultural perspective.

• Funding Agency: European Commission
• Starting date: October 22
• Duration: 47 months

OPINION

What are Opinions? Integrating Theory and Methods for Automatically Analyzing Opinionated Communications

OPINION will establish the field of textual opinion research, a critical upgrade for the emerging field of computational communication science. The Action aims to provide the much-needed conceptual grounding, methodological integration and training to significantly advance the use of computational methods for studying digital text. The Action will develop united conceptual foundations and research agendas, as well as versatile computational measurement strategies for the study of opinionated text, while advancing computational skills and building a community of computational textual opinion researchers.

• Funding Agency: European Commission
• Starting date: September 22
• Duration: 48 months

ord47

Open research data for the 7th arts

In the age of cultural digitalization, archives have finally become manageable and accessible in an ever-increasing manner, as new forms of cultural agency, outreach and empowerment play an ever-greater role in global discourse. In this project we focus on the archives of the Locarno Film Festival as an exemplary instance of archives of cinematographic material, in particular the critical reviews and the documentation that revolves around the cinematographic piece of work. Currently the archives of the Locarno Film Festival, the RSI Radiotelevisione Svizzera at Lugano and the Cinémathèque Suisse at Lausanne constitute up until now a by and large dormant legacy in relation to the Locarno Film Festival, the overriding importance of which we are only beginning to grasp and become aware of. The open research data paradigm allows kissing this patrimony finally awake, removing it from the amnesic bowels of archival shelving. This will only be possible with the publication of a shared ontology to provide access to the archive content as linked open data (LOD).

• Funding Agency: Swiss Confederation
• Starting date: May 2023
• Duration: 17 months

PACINO

Personality And Conversational INformatiOn Accesss

Over the past few years, an increasing amount of attention has been directed toward developing methods that enable Conversational Information Retrieval (CIR) and has brought forward the initial development of CIR systems. A CIR system should be able to understand the user query, interact with the user to get a better understanding of the user information need, ask clarifying questions, improve the search results in the light of the clarifications provided, and extract and present search results/answers in a simple and clear way. PACINO is concerned with advancing the state of the art of CIR systems to enable the development of a Personalized CIR system that will interact with the user in a multi-turn and mixed-initiative conversation manner to enable the user to perform exploratory searches on any topic. The CS system will incorporate an understanding of various aspects of the dialogue with a user, including user's personality recognition, personality disorder identification, adaptation, and dealing with unfair and biased search results. In other words, the system will adapt the modality of interaction and dialogue to the user's behavior and personality enabling a more engaging and effective information-seeking experience.

• Funding Agency: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
• Starting date: Oct 2023
• Duration: 48 months

EUGAIN

European Network For Gender Balance in Informaticss

Women are underrepresented in Informatics (Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Computing, ICT) at all levels, from undergraduate and graduate studies to participation and leadership in academia and industry. Increasing female representation in the field is a grand challenge for academics, policymakers, and society as a whole. Although the problem is evident, progress has been invariably slow, in spite of all the momentum and impulse for change happening across Europe. The main aim of this COST Action is to improve gender balance in Informatics through the creation and strengthening of a truly multi-cultural European network of academics working on the forefront of the efforts in their countries, institutions and research communities. We will be building on their knowledge, experiences, struggles, successes, and failures, learning and sharing what has worked and how it could be transferred to other institutions and countries.

• Funding Agency: European Commission
• Starting date: May 23
• Duration: 48 months

TADAA

Tools for Assessing and Developing Affecting & Attractive Narratives for Girls in Informaticss

TADAA aims to address the gender imbalance in the field of Informatics. By involving teachers, children, and parents in a collaborative design approach, the project seeks to create tools that support the adoption of gender diversity teaching methods and stereotype-aware content. The research will focus on assessing gender biases in narratives, providing scaffolding for teachers, and studying the role of technology in detecting stereotypes.TADAA aims to contribute to the Child Computer Interaction community and the broader goal of achieving gender balance in Informatics.

• Funding Agency: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
• Starting date: May 23
• Duration: 48 months

EVAL-D

Evaluation of Empathic Conversational Search for Depression assessment & supports

• Funding Agency: SERI-Segreteria di Stato per l'Educazione e la Ricerca
• Starting date: 1st April 2024
• Duration: 10 Months

SOL

Scaffolding to foster independence when children search Online for Learnings

With SOL, we answer the following RQ: what is the scaffolding needed to enable search for learning while learning to search in the classroom, regardless of the search tools enabling access to information?. This is a vital endeavour since, despite the common practice of seeking and using online resources for school assignments, children of varying ages and literacy levels still face challenges to effectively utilise search tools to locate and recognise useful materials. To ensure progress towards successful completion, we focus on children aged 9 to 12, who are in a similar stage of development and have acquired reading and writing skills and define 3 research objectives: (i) Identify children’s needs when searching for learning; (ii) Translate user and context requirements into a CIIR design framework & technologies; and (iii) Study the impact of scaffolding on SAL.

• Funding Agency: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
• Starting date: 1st April 2024
• Duration: 4 Years

RelMobIR

RELevance criteria combination for MOBile Information Retrievals

Context-aware mobile IR systems are able to estimate the relevance of a given page in relation to several different aspects. The first aspect is obviously topical relevance, but other types of relevance play an important role, like for example geographic, temporal or opinion relevance. This project addresses the problem of combining relevance criteria for mobile IR, in order to determine the effective overall relevance of a document to a user information need. The work starts by addressing how to best estimate these different relevance criteria for a document, given what is know of the user’s opinions, preferences and his spatiotemporal context. It then addresses the problem of the best combination of these relevance estimates, under the assumption of their independence from each other.

• Funding Agency: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
• Starting date: April 2015
• Duration: 36 months

OpiTrack

Tracking Opinion Changes over Times

Recent years have seen the rapid growth of social media platforms that enable people to express their thoughts and opinions on the web and share them with other users. Many people write their opinion about products, movies, people or events on blogs, forums or review sites. In OpiTrack we will extend the latest models of opinion retrieval and sentiment analysis by incorporating time in the opinion analysis. We will develop models that track sentiment over time also covering different aspects of a topic. We will also develop models that will attempt to predict the sentiment change toward a topic at a certain time in future. The models developed will be evaluated with real data.

• Funding Agency: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
• Starting date: June 2014
• Duration: 48 months

AHTOM

Asynchronous and Heterogenous Topic Minings

The project will develop a set of models and respective software tools for topic mining of asynchronous and heterogeneous streams that will enable: (a) the discovery of a set of topics expressed by heterogeneous documents in multiple streams; (b) the quantification of the similarity between documents in terms of content re-use; (c) the tracking of the flow and changes of content over time; and (d) the discovery of significant temporal dependencies among the streams, providing quantitative measures of the importance, authoritativeness and timeliness of each stream in relation to a topic or set of topics.

• Funding Agency: Secretariat d'Etat a l'Education et a la Researche (SER)
• Starting date: Jan 2016
• Duration: 24 months

KEYSTONE

Semantic Keyword-based Search on Structured Data Sourcess

Keyword searching is becoming a valuable alternative to traditional structured queries, mainly due to its simplicity and the basic knowledge required from users. Nevertheless, existing approaches suffer from a number of limitations when applied to multi-source scenarios requiring some form of query planning, and with frequent updates precluding any effective implementation of data indexes. KEYSTONE proposes to join synergies from several disciplines, such as semantic data management, the semantic web, information retrieval, artificial intelligence, machine learning, user interaction, service science, service design, and natural language processing, to build an effective solution to this problem.

• Funding Agency: May 2013
• Starting date: Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Action IC1302
• Duration: 48 months

eRisk

Early risk prediction on the Internet: an evaluation corpus (International Short Visit)s

The project focuses on evaluation, which is the key to making progress in building better search and classification solutions. It involves the study of the adequacy of different types of Internet repositories as data sources to create test collections for research on early risk prediction and the design and construction of a new such collection. The collection will be made available to the research community, together with a suitable evaluation methodology.

• Funding Agency: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
• Starting date: June 2015
• Duration: 6 months

SERI

Detecting and Tracking Emotion Expressions in Comparative Opinionss

This project aims at advancing research on opinion mining by looking at sentences expressing comparative opinions. The project objectives are: 1) develop a model for identifying comparative opinions; 2) implement a demonstration system of the above model in a realistic application scenario; 3) develop a proper evaluation framework for detecting and tracking emotion expressions implying comparative opinions over time; 4) finally, evaluate the proposed models with the evaluation framework developed in point 3. This will involve a close collaboration between the two teams of USI (Prof. Fabio Crestani) and the University of Malaya (Dr. Kasturi Dewi Varathan).

• Funding Agency: Scientific & Technological Cooperation Programme
• Starting date: June 2015
• Duration: 6 months

Yahoo FREP

Mobile query-rewriting and suggestion using geographical featuress

The objective of query-rewriting is to rewrite the original query submitted by the user to better fit it to the perceived user information need. In this project we will design a set of algorithms for the personalisation and geo-contextualisation of query suggestion and rewriting. The expected results will be measured in terms of the correctness of the rewriting model, where we expect a substantial increase in performance compared with other personalisation (without contextualisation) models.

• Funding Agency: Yahoo!
• Starting date: February 2015
• Duration: 18 months

EU FET Recall

Re-thinking and Re-defining memory augmentations

The RECALL project aims to re-think and re-define the notion of memory augmentation. Recent developments in capture technology and information retrieval allow for continuous and automated recordings of many aspects of our everyday lives. RECALL will harness these trends and develop a new paradigm for memory augmentation technologies that are technically feasible, desired by users, and beneficial to society.

• Funding Agency: EU FET
• Starting date: November 2013
• Duration: 36 months

HASS

Harnessing and Advancing Social Searchs

In this project we investigate searching and browsing in social sites and determine where the one-shot and one-size-fits-all paradigm of search is failing users and does not sufficiently assist them with their information gathering task. We use modern statistical learning techniques to develop models that are able to utilise personalisation, temporal task-based knowledge and topical information derived from the corpus to improve search. The proposed work significantly extend earlier work in personalisation of social media search and latent topic models carried out by the applicant.

• Funding Agency: Secretariat d'Etat a l'Education et a la Researche (SER)
• Starting date: January 2013
• Duration: 24 months

MUMIA

Multilingual and Multifaceted Interactive Information Accesss

This COST Action explores innovative frameworks to empower the synergies from the disparate research fields of Machine Translation, Information Retrieval and Multifaceted Interactive Information Access within the specific context of patent search and other next generation Web applications. See here for more information.

• Funding Agency: Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Action IC1002
• Starting date: November 2010
• Duration: 48 months

HEBE

Highly Engaging e-Book Experiencess

HEBE -Highly Engaging e-Book Experiences- aims at producing novel interfaces for playing, interacting and reading e-books for children. We propose in this study to involve children in exploring different type of technology, hardware and software, in order to produce more engaging, usable and fun e-book interfaces for them. The main hypothesis of the study is that in order to make e-reading a fun experience for children new innovative interfaces are needed and children should take an active role in their design.

• Funding Agency: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
• Starting date: September 2010
• Duration: 36 months

ACAMIR

Ambient and Context-Aware Multimedia Information Retrievals

This collaborative project with AT&T Labs deals with designing, implementing and evaluation new mobile interfaces for information retrieval. In particular, in this project we are developing a Just-in-Time Mobile Information Retrieval (JIT-MobIR) system. The system is able to predict user actions and needs and generate appropriate queries to find the information before the user actually knows he needs it.

• Funding Agency: AT&T Labs, Middletown, NJ, USA
• Starting date: June 2010
• Duration: 36 months

C-MS-TDT

Robust Incremental Clustering for Multi-Stream Topic Detection and Trackings

The vast majority of current TDT research makes two important assumptions about the nature of news: a) every news story discusses only one topic (in order to place a story to exactly one cluster); b) any hierarchical relationships between events should be ignored (to avoid the problem of events within events). The aim of this project is to devise some clustering technique that will allow us to remove (or significantly simplify) these two assumptions, as they limit considerably the power of TDT models.

• Funding Agency: Scientific & Technological Cooperation Programme: Switzerland-Russia
• Starting date: May 2010
• Duration: 8 months

ChatMiner

Mining Conversational Content for Topic Modelling and Author Identifications

In this project we will extend the latest models of statistical content analysis, that are proving successful in the areas of text mining and information retrieval, for the mining of conversational content for topic identification (what is the conversation about?) and author identification (who are the people involved in the conversation?).

• Funding Agency: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
• Starting date: April 2010
• Duration: 36 months

IPS

Interactive Patent Searchs

The project has two different but integrated objectives. The first is to study how selected categories of users search for patents in relation to specific information needs and tasks. This will result in a set of guidelines to drive the design of innovative and more usable interactive systems for patent search. The second objective is to use these guidelines for the design and implementation of a new interactive patent search system that will then be evaluated with real users in the context of real search tasks, using a user and task oriented evaluation methodology. The emphasis in both objectives is on interactivity.

• Funding Agency: Information Retrieval Facility
• Starting date: March 2010
• Duration: 36 months

MS-TDT

Multi-Stream Topic Detection and Trackings

The main objective of the project is to investigate multi-stream Topic Detection and Tracking by designing new algorithms for robust Story Link Detection in noisy streams that will work across several heterogeneous text streams. In addition, the project will study multi/cross-stream dependency, centrality, and authoritativeness, applying to streams work currently being carried out in stream segmentation and stream data mining.

• Funding Agency: Hasler Stiftung
• Starting date: August 2009
• Duration: 12 months

OpiSoft

Combining Soft Computing and Statistics for Opinion Finding and Polarity Detection in Blogss

In this project we investigate the combination of Soft Computing and statistical techniques for feature selection for the tasks of opinion finding and opinion polarity detection, in order to create automatically a weighted dictionary of opinion-bearing terms that will be used to determine, in a query independent way, the topical-opinion of a blog post. The project is closely connected to the IR group participation in the COST Action IC0702.

• Funding Agency: Secretariat d'Etat a l'Education et a la Researche (SER)
• Starting date: April 2009
• Duration: 36 months

Puppy IR

Open Source Environment to construct Information Services for Childrens

This FP7 STREP project will develop new interaction paradigms to allow children to easily express their information need, to have results presented in an intuitive way and to engage children in system interaction. It will also propose novel child-centered evaluation methodologies. The project is based at the University of Strathclyde.

• Funding Agency: European ICT 7th Framework Program
• Starting date: April 2009
• Duration: 30 months

DEDUCE

Design of new tools to express Emotions During User Centred Evaluations

The project aims at designing, implementing and evaluating new tools for allowing easier interactions with users when measuring usability of interactive systems. In particular, the project will concentrate on tangible tool for children.

• Funding Agency: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
• Starting date: December 2008
• Duration: 36 months

ADIR+

Extending Adaptive Distributed Information Retrievals

The project extends and complements the work carried out in the SNSF project ADIR (Adaptive Information Retrieval), by designing, implementing and testing personalised and adaptive resource selection methods to be used for Distributed Information Retrieval with un-cooperative resources.

• Funding Agency: Hasler Stiftung
• Starting date: August 2008
• Duration: 12 months

XMI

Cross-media Indexings

This project aims at investigating different mathematical models of cross-media and cross-modal indexing. In particular, it will develop models of heterogeneous evidence combination that will also be useful for other applications, like for example blog search and topic distillation.

• Funding Agency: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
• Starting date: June 2008
• Duration: 36 months

NEMO

Personalised Federated Search of the Deep Webs

The project is concerned with the design, implementation and testing of advanced resource description, resource selection and results fusions methods for Distributed Information Retrieval. These methods can be automatically personalised to the user task and user needs and are specifically designed to access information held in the Deep Web (i.e. in non-cooperative and heterogeneous resources). The project is based at the University of Strathclyde. Here for more information.

• Funding Agency: UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
• Starting date: April 2008
• Duration: 24 months

SoftStat

Combining Soft Computing Techniques and Statistical Methods to Improve Data Analysis Solutionss

The main objective of the COST action IC0702 "Combining Soft Computing Techniques and Statistical Methods to Improve Data Analysis Solutions" is to strengthen the dialogue between the statistics and soft computing research communities in order to cross-pollinate both fields and generate mutual improvement activities. Here for more information.

• Funding Agency: European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) program
• Starting date: January 2008
• Duration: 48 months

ADIR

Adaptive Distributed Information Retrievals

The project is concerned withe the design, implementation and evaluation of personalised and adaptive resource description methods for un-cooperative resources. The produced resource descriptions will be used by advance resource selections methods for Distributed Information Retrieval.

• Funding Agency: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
• Starting date: August 2007
• Duration: 12 months

iMOV

Interactive Modus Operandi Visualisation Systems

The project aims at the design, implementation, and evaluation of an interactive modus operandi mining and visualisation system, integrating behavioural and geographical information. The system it to be used by the police for suspect prioritisation and investigation Management. The project was based at the University of Strathclyde. More information here.

• Funding Agency: UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
• Starting date: August 2006
• Duration: 24 months

PENG

Personalised News Content Programmings

The PENG project aims at defining a flexible, personalised and context-aware system for the gathering, filtering, retrieval and presentation of multimedia news for news professionals (e.g. journalists and editors), with a view of making the system also available later for general users. The project was based at the University of Strathclyde. Project website.

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REVEAL-THIS

Retrieval of Video and Language for The Home user in an Information Societys

REVEAL-THIS addresses a basic need underlying content organisation, filtering, consumption and enjoyment by developing content programming systems that will help European citizens keep up with the explosion of digital content scattered over different platforms, media and different languages. The project was based at the University of Strathclyde. Project website.

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DILIGENT

A Digital Library Infrastructure on Grid Enabled Technologys

The objective of DILIGENT is to create an advanced test-bed that will allow members of dynamic virtual e-Science organisations to access shared knowledge and to collaborate in a secure, coordinated, dynamic and cost-effective way. This test-bed will be built by integrating Grid and Digital Library technologies. The project was based at the University of Strathclyde.

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NED4PENG

New Event Detection for Personalised News Content Programmings

The project investigated a formalisation of the New Event Detection problem that fits into the PENG (Personalised News Content Programming) framework. This formalisation allows for a personal definition of what a new event is, obtained from user feedback. This enables for the definition of models of NED that are adaptive to the user changing interests and changing perception of what constitutes a new event. The project was based at the University of Strathclyde and funded a 6 months collaboration with Xerox Parc, in Paolo Alto, CA, USA. More info here.

• Funding Agency: UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
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SGES

Information Credibility on Social-Medias

This project is linked AHTOM project, in the sense that it aims at attaching a measure of trustworthiness and quality to the links discovered by that approach. This would enable to weight the links not just by topicality, but also by other non-topical properties of the information.

• Funding Agency: Swiss Government Excellence Scholarships for Foreign Scholars
• Starting date: October 2017
• Duration: 36 months

GSKN

The Global Structure of Knowledge Networks: Data, Models and Empirical Resultss

Understanding how new knowledge is produced by recombination of existing knowledge is the key to understand, and predict technological, scientific and social innovation. By tracking at least 35 years of patent citations, combined with information on corporate entities, the project aims at develop and test new and innovative information retrieval techniques and new network-analytic models for the analysis of such a large datasets of complex micro-relational structures. One objective of the project is to make available the next generation of statistical models for the analysis of “big” network data to the community of data scientists. A second objective relates to the study of different subnetworks linking Switzerland to the global structure of knowledge networks, and to represent the evolutionary development of knowledge structures in which Switzerland is embedded. The third objective is the development of new computational statistical models for representing and analyzing large-scale knowledge networks.

• Funding Agency: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), Big data Call
• Starting date: September 2017
• Duration: 48 months

EvalPCIR

Evaluation of Personalised Conversational Information Retrievals

• Funding Agency: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
• Starting date: 1st April 2024
• Duration: 4 Months