About Us

Maria Soledad Pera is an Associate Professor at the Web Information Sys- tems group of the EEMCS faculty at TU Delft. Sole’s research focuses on Information Retrieval, with a special emphasis on enhancing information access for typically underserved user groups. She serves as (S)PC for confer- ences including SIGIR, UMAP, CHIIR, RecSys, and ECIR. She was General Chair for RecSys ’18 and Program Chair for UMAP ’23. Among others, she co-organized the Workshop on Educational Recommender Systems, the ComplexRec workshop, and 6 editions of the KidRec workshop (focused on search and recommendation for children).

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Federica Cena is an Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of Turin. She works on the intersection of Artificial Intel- ligence and Human-Computer Interaction. Her recent research has studied the implications of the Internet of Things for user modeling and personaliza- tion, with a special focus on assistive applications for cognitive disabilities and frailty.

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Theo Huibers has been researching information retrieval and human media interaction for over 30 years. Since 2002, he is a professor in Human Media Interaction & Computer Science at the University of Twente and co-founder of Wizenoze, an international eTech company founded in 2013.

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Monica Landoni is a titular professor at the faculty of Informatics at Univer- sit`a della Svizzera Italiana (USI). She is vice chair of the ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference Steering Committee and an active member of EUGAIN, the European Network For Gender Balance in Informatics. She has worked on several national and European projects investigating how technology can support children when searching, writing, and reading for education and pleasure. While doing that, she has happily designed and conducted many collaborative design sessions in formal and informal set- tings, carefully taking into account the needs, requests, roles, and points of view of real users, often from understudied communities.

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Noemi Mauro is an Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of Torino where she obtained a PhD in Computer Science with Honors. Her research interests concern user modeling, recommender sys- tems, cultural heritage, information filtering, and information visualization. She won the best paper award at UMAP ‘20 with the paper “Personalized Recommendation of PoIs to People with Autism”. She is a PC member of the top conferences in her research areas and a reviewer for several related journals. She co-edited the special issue “Intelligent Systems for People with 1st Workshop on Information Retrieval for Understudied Users (IR4U2) Diverse Cognitive Abilities” in the Human-computer Interaction journal. She is an Editorial Board Member of the User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction journal.

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Emiliana Murgia With a degree in Literature and various training courses, including Communication and Management of School and Training Institutions, Emiliana Murgia transitioned from a career in communication to teaching at the primary school in 1999/2000; actively promoting technology in education, she has been a ”digital animator” at school, managing various national and international projects, and has collaborated with the University of Milano Bicocca since 2014 on teaching with technologies. In 2018, she joined a multidisciplinary research team focusing on online information access, including AI. Currently on secondment to participate in a National Doctorate program in Learning Sciences and Digital Technologies. Affiliations with professional organizations, including ACM, ATEE, and SIREM.