Modern Information Retrieval
 Biographies of main authors
Contents
Ricardo Baeza-Yates Berthier Ribeiro-Neto
www: http://www.dcc.uchile.cl/~rbaeza
e-mail: rbaeza@dcc.uchile.cl 		www: http://www.dcc.ufmg.br/~berthier
e-mail: berthier@dcc.ufmg.br
Ricardo Baeza-Yates received the bachelor degree in CS in 1983 from the University of Chile. Later, he received also the M.Sc. in CS (1985), the professional title in electrical engineering (1985), and the M.Eng. in EE (1986) from the same university. He received his Ph.D. in CS from the U. of Waterloo, Canada, in 1989. He has been the president of the Chilean Computer Science Society (SCCC) from 1992 to 1995 and from 1997 to 1998. During 1993, he received the Organization of the American States award for young researchers in exact sciences. Currently, he is a full professor at the CS department of the University of Chile, where he was the chairperson in the period 1993-95. He is coauthor of the 2nd edition of the Handbook of Algorithms and Data Structures, Addison-Wesley, 1991; and coeditor of Information Retrieval: Algorithms and Data Structures, Prentice-Hall, 1992. He has also contributed several papers to journals published by professional organizations such as ACM, IEEE, and SIAM.

His research interests include algorithms and data structures, text retrieval, graphical interfaces, and visualization applied to databases. He currently coordinates an Iberoamerican project on models and techniques for searching the Web financed by the Spanish agency Cyted. He has been a visiting professor or an invited speaker at several conferences and universities all around the world, as well as referee for several journals, conferences, NSF, etc. He is member of the ACM, AMS, EATCS, IEEE, SCCC and SIAM.

Berthier Ribeiro-Neto received a Bachellor degree in Math, a BS degree in Electrical Engineering, and an MS degree in Computer Science from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, in 1980, 1982, and 1986, respectively. From 1986 to 1988, he worked as a consultant to the Telecommunications Company of the State of Minas Gerais -- Telemig. Following, he left to the University of California at Los Angeles where he got a PhD degree in Computer Science in 1995. Since then, he has been with the Computer Science Department at the Federal University of Minas Gerais where he is an Associate Professor.

His main interests are information retrieval systems, digital libraries, interfaces for the Web, and video on demand. He has been involved in a number of research projects financed through Brazilian national agencies such as the Ministry of Science and Technology (MCT) and the National Research Council (CNPq). From the projects currently under way, the two main ones deal with wireless information systems (project SIAM financed within program PRONEX) and video on demand (project ALMADEM financed within program PROTEM-III). Dr. Ribeiro-Neto is also involved with an Iberoamerican project on information systems for the Web coordinated by Prof. Ricardo Baeza-Yates. He was the chair of SPIRE'98 (String Processing and Information Retrieval South American Symposium), is the chair of SBBD'99 (Brazilian Symposium on Databases), and has been in the committee of several conferences in Brazil, in South America and in the USA. He is a member of ACM, ASIS and IEEE.