Fausto Rabitti
Information Science and Technology Institute, National Research Council, Italy

It is always interesting a retrospective view on the evolution of a research area in a long period of time. Considering the impact of the research results on the development of the society after many years, it is possible to observe that the judgment on the importance of certain research results may change a great deal: what was considered very important time ago might result irrelevant after many years while marginal research results may lead to important results. Based on my personal experience in Information Retrieval research, especially in many European research projects, I will try to give a retrospective view of the IR research developments in the last 40 years, considering the impact of the research results in the long run. My personal view is that the IR approach and the IR technology have influenced many important sectors of today society, that could not be foreseen 40 years ago: web search engines, image/video search (CBIR), big data applications, etc. In particular, I will show some recent results based on the extension of IR technology with machine learning techniques (deep learning).

Fausto Rabitti is Senior Research Associate of ISTI (Information Science and Technology Institute) of the National Research Council (CNR) in Pisa (the largest CNR institute in computer science) after retiring on January 2019 from the position of Research Director of the NeMIS (Networked Multimedia Information Systems) lab of ISTI. He is also a member of the managing board of Visual Engines, a start-up company founded by members of the NEMIS lab (including Fausto Rabitti) and INERA s.r.l. He has managed several international and national projects in the area of multimedia digital libraries, similarity-based searching and Content-based Image Retrieval systems. In 2018, as research director of the NeMIS Lab, he was involved in the management of 17 European Projects. He has extensively published in international journal and conferences. He has been member of the Program Committee of numerous important international conferences and member of the Editorial Board of Information Processing and Management. From 2008 to 2018, he has been CNR representative in the Executive Committee of ERCIM EEIG (European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics), vicerepresentative of CNR in ERCIM AISBL and member of Science Task Group of ERCIM AISBL.