Professor Steve Whittaker is Chair in Information Studies at Sheffield University. His research interests are in the theory, design and evaluation of collaborative systems, as well as multimedia access and retrieval. He has worked for Hewlett Packard Labs (US and UK), Lotus, IBM Research, Bell Labs and AT&T Labs-Research. He has also been visiting faculty at Stanford and Edinburgh Universities. In the past he has designed and built many novel collaborative systems in business and university settings. These include: an early personal memory system, one of the first IM clients, shared workspaces, social email clients, meeting capture systems, and various tools for accessing and browsing speech. He has co-authored over 100 refereed journal or conference papers (excluding workshop papers) which have been cited about 3000 times. He is holder of 11 US and UK patents, and is currently on the Editorial Board of the Human Computer Interaction and Discourse Processes journals and was Chair of CSCW 2000. He is currently working on digital tools that help us remember and share our memories.

The future of information retrieval

I will discuss the trends of the last 10 years, including the rise of search engines such as Google which use algorithms which have strong social components and simple user interfaces. I will identify some key challenges for the future of information retrieval, including information overload, multimedia retrieval and personal information management and describe new technologies that address these problems.