Ryen W. White, Microsoft Research, USA
Ryen W. White is a Researcher in the Text Mining, Search, and Navigation Group at Microsoft Research. His research interests include exploratory search, implicit relevance feedback, query expansion, log analysis, and the evaluation of search systems with humans and simulations. Ryen has authored over 40 conference and journal publications, received two “best paper” awards, and the British Computer Society’s Distinguished Dissertation Award for the best Computer Science Ph.D. in the United Kingdom in 2005.

Steven M. Drucker, Microsoft Live Labs, USA
Steven M. Drucker recently joined the LiveLabs Group at Microsoft as a Senior Scientist. He is working on user interaction and information visualization for web based projects. Previously, he was lead researcher of both the Next Media Research and Virtual Worlds groups at Microsoft Research, where he has looked at how the addition of user interaction transforms conventional media, and helped architect a platform for multi-user virtual environments. While at MSR he has filed over 50 patents and published papers on architectures for multi-user, multimedia systems to online social interaction. He received his Ph.D. from the Computer Graphics and Animation Group at the MIT Media Lab in 1994.

Gary Marchionini, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
Gary Marchionini is Cary C. Boshamer Professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina where he teaches courses in human-information interaction, interface design and testing, and digital libraries. He heads the Interaction Design Laboratory at SILS. Current interests and projects are related to: interfaces that support information seeking and information retrieval; WWW-based statistical information; alternative representations for electronic documents; multimedia browsing strategies; digital libraries; information architecture; and evaluation of interactive media, especially for learning and teaching.

Marti Hearst, University of California at Berkeley, USA
Marti Hearst is an Associate Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley. Her primary research interests are user interfaces and visualization for information retrieval, empirical computational linguistics, and text data mining. She has been promoting faceted navigation for many years via the Flamenco project, and has developed a number of other search user interfaces. She has also written the textbook chapter on search user interfaces for the widely used textbook Modern Information Retrieval. She teaches User Interface Design, Information Visualization and Presentation, Search Engines: Society Technology and Business, and Applied Computational Linguistics.

m.c. schraefel, University of Southampton, UK
monica mc schraefel is a Senior Lecturer in the IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK. Prior to this, she was an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, Canada; a researcher at AT&T Research Labs in the Online Platform Research Group, New Jersey; and a faculty member in CS at the U. of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada.