Ricardo Baeza-Yates - Biography

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Biografía resumida en castellano

Ricardo Baeza-Yates was born in March, 21st, 1961 at Santiago de Chile. He started his electrical engineering studies at the University of Chile in 1979, finishing with the highest degree in January of 1985, and obtaining the award ``Marcos Orrego Puelma" given by the Institute of Engineers of Chile to the best student of each year. During the same time he pursued the B.Sc. & M.Sc. in Computer Science ending also in 1985. His thesis concerning the analysis of algorithms on search trees, generated several publications. The same year he joined the Computer Science department of the University of Chile as a lecturer. In 1986 he obtained the M.Eng. degree on Electronics (Digital Systems) with a thesis on computer graphics. That year he started his Ph.D. studies at the University of Waterloo, Canada, which were finished in 1989. During that time he obtained several scholarships from the province of Ontario, the Institute for Computer Research, the Information Technology and Research Centre, and the Univ. of Waterloo. He finished his courses with an average grade of 98%. His Ph.D. thesis was done under the supervision of Gaston Gonnet, and working on the project which computarized the Oxford English Dictionary. The specific topic was algorithms for text searching, and the results of the thesis generated several journal and conference papers. After that, he held a post-doctoral fellowship for six months before coming back to the Dept. of Computer Science at the Univ. of Chile.

In 1990 he was promoted to the associate professor level and from 1990 to 1991 he was in charge of the M.Sc. program in Computer Science. As a teacher, he has introduced several new courses on key technologies, including computer graphics (1985), graphical interfaces over X-windows (1990), object orientation (1991), and bioinformatics (2001). During this period he continued to do research on algorithms, text retrieval, program animation, and graphical interfaces. Under his guidance, several students have obtained the engineering or M.Sc./Ph.D. degrees in computer science. He has obtained several research grants from the National Research Council (CONICYT), private institutions and the government of Spain, closely working with researchers in Brazil, Canada, France, Spain, United States, and Venezuela.

One of his research projects, jointly with a software house, produced a state-of-the-art text retrieval package for Windows, which obtained the PC-Magazine prize for the best chilean software in 1992. This software, SearchCity, was mentioned in Byte and Communications of the ACM, but the lack of marketing capital aborted this endevour.

In 1992 he was elected president of the Chilean Computer Science Society (SCCC) for a two year period. During 1993, he was elected chairman for two years of the CS Dept. at the Univ. of Chile and received the Organization of American States (OAS) prize for young researchers in science. During 1994 he received an award from the Institute of Engineers of Chile for the best engineering research trajectory of the past 5 years. He was also reelected as president of the SCCC, position that he held until October of 1995, being reelected again in November of 1996. In April of 1995 was promoted to Professor and in September of that year finished his period as chair. During 1996 he was in a sabbatical at the Univ. Politecnica de Catalunya and in 1997 jointly with Eduardo Barbosa and Nivio Ziviani won the Compaq Prize to the best Brazilian research article in basic CS. From 1998-2000 he was in charge of the IEEE-CS chapter in Chile and has been involved in the South American ACM Programming Contest since 1998. Between 2001-2004 he was also president of CLEI, a Latin American association of CS departments; and between 2000-2004 he coordinated the CYTED (Iberoamerican cooperation in science and technology) program in Electronics and Informatics. In 2001 he was elected to the IEEE CS Board of Governors for the period 2002-04 and he was departamental chair again for the period 2003-2004. In 2003 he was incorporated to the Chilean Sciences Academy, the first computer scientist to achieve that position in Chile.

In 2002 he obtained a large grant from the Chilean government to launch the Center of Web Research. His research interests include information retrieval, algorithms, and information visualization. He is co-author of the book Modern Information Retrieval, published in 1999 by Addison-Wesley, as well as co-author of the 2nd edition of the Handbook of Algorithms and Data Structures, Addison-Wesley, 1991; and co-editor of Information Retrieval: Algorithms and Data Structures, Prentice-Hall, 1992, between other publications in journals published by ACM, IEEE or SIAM. He has been visiting professor or invited speaker at several conferences and universities all around the world, as well as referee of many journals, conferences, NSF, etc. He is member of the ACM, AMS, EATCS, IEEE (senior member) & IEEE-CS, SCCC and SIAM.

In the professional side, he has been Consultant to the National Identification Bureau on imaging technology (1995-2000), on CS education to IBM (1994), on computer architecture to Sonda (DEC distributor in Chile, 1995) and for the Informatization Project of the National Congress (1991-92). He has also been Consultor of IOM (International Organization for Migrations, UN) for the analysis of the Information System of the Chilean National Congress (1990). Also technical assesor for a mid-range computer equipment survey in Chile conducted by Langton-Clarke (1990); and design assesor in several software development projects and commercial systems. In 2000 he launched a spin-off of Web searching technology which has as a showroom a search engine for the Chilean Web (www.todocl.com or www.todocl.cl ).