Professor C. J. Keith van Rijsbergen (original) (raw)
Professor, and leader of the Information Retrieval Group, in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow.
Keith van Rijsbergen was born in Holland in 1943. He was educated in Holland, Indonesia, Namibia and Australia. He took a degree in mathematics at the University of Western Australia. As a graduate he spent two years tutoring in mathematics while studying computer science. In 1972 he completed a Ph.D. in computer science at Cambridge University. After almost three years of lecturing in information retrieval and artificial intelligence at Monash University he returned to the Cambridge Computer Laboratory to hold a Royal Society Information Research Fellowship. In 1980 he was appointed to the chair of computer science at University College Dublin; from there he moved in 1986 to the Glasgow University where he is now.
Since about 1969 his research has been devoted to information retrieval, covering both theoretical and experimental aspects. He has specified several theoretical models for IR and seen some of them from the specification and prototype stage through to production. His current research is concerned with the design of appropriate logics to model the flow of information. He has been involved in a number of EU projects and working groups on IR, including Fermi, Miro, Mira, Idomeneus, and more recently K-space. He is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Royal Society of Edinburgh, IEE, BCS, and ACM. In 1993 he was appointed Editor-in-Chief of The Computer Journal, an appointment he held until 2000. He has served as a programme committee member and editorial board member of the major IR conferences and journals. He is the author of a well-known book Information Retrieval, Butterworths, 1979. In 1999, together with Crestani and Lalmas,he published a book entitled "Information Retrieval: Uncertainty and Logics". His most recent book is The Geometry of Information Retrieval, CUP, 2004. Some of his old papers can be accessed here.