Short Biography

Nivio Ziviani has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, Canada, 1982. He is a Professor Emeritus at the Department of Computer Science of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil, where he coordinates the Laboratory for Treating Information (LATIN). He is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and of the National Order of the Scientific Merit in the class Comendador. He received the Prize of Scientific Merit of the Brazilian Computer Science Society in 2011. He is a co-founder of Miner Technology Group, sold to Folha de São Paulo / UOL group in 1999, and Akwan Information Technologies, sold to Google Inc. in 2005. He has co-authored of over 100 refereed papers and 2 books in the areas of algorithm design and information retrieval, the latter his primary area of research. He was General Co-Chair of the 28th ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval and co-founder of the International Conference on String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE).