Kerry Rodden (Google) is a senior user experience researcher, leading a group that conducts user studies to inform the design of Google's web search and other search products. These studies span a wide range of methods, including usability testing, eye-tracking, logs analysis, and field studies. She is also active in the human-computer interaction and information retrieval research communities, publishing and reviewing in these areas.

Ian Ruthven (University of Strathclyde) is a senior lecturer in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences where he heads the i-lab research group.His major research interests are in the area of interactive information retrieval and user studies of search systems. He published widely in these areas as well as serving as program and conference chairs in interactive IR-related areas and editing special issues on interactive IR evaluation and contextual IR systems.

Ryen White (Microsoft Research) is a researcher in the Text Mining, Search, and Navigation Group, where he conducts basic and applied research on exploratory search, implicit feedback, query expansion, log analysis, and the evaluation of search systems with humans and simulations. Ryen has published widely in these areas, and has prior experience organizing an April 2006 special section of Communications of the ACM, a SIGIR 2006 workshop, and a forthcoming SIGCHI 2007 workshop.