Nicola Ferro (http://www.dei.unipd.it/~ferro/) is full professor in computer science at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padua. His main research interests are information retrieval, search engines, experimental evaluation, digital libraries and databases.

He has published more than 400 papers on experimental evaluation, multilingual information access, the management of the scientific data produced during evaluation campaigns, digital library architectures, interoperability and service.

He was inducted in 2023 to the ACM SIGIR Academy (https://sigir.org/awards/sigir-academy/), which honors and recognizes individuals who have made significant, cumulative contributions to the development of the field of Information Retrieval (IR); inductees to the SIGIR Academy are the principal leaders in IR, whose efforts have shaped the discipline and/or industry through significant research, innovation, and/or service.

He was Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS).

He was General Chair of ECIR 2016, the European Conference on Information Retrieval and of SIGIR 2025, the International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval.

He chairs the Steering Committee of the CLEF Initiative (http://www.clef-initiative.eu/), the European evaluation initiative, which promotes research and development of information access systems with an emphasis on multilingual and multimodal information with various levels of structure ranging from unstructured, semi- structured, to highly-structured, and semantically enriched data. In 2010 a profound renewal process of CLEF has been started and now it is an independent event structured in two main parts: (i) the Evaluation Labs to conduct evaluation of information access systems; (ii) a peer-reviewed Conference concerning research in evaluation methodologies and challenges. In 2013 he (co)-founded the CLEF Association, a not-for-profit legal entity sustaining CLEF where he acts as president.

He chairs the Steering Committee of ESSIR (https://www.essir.eu/), the European Summer School on Information Retrieval.

He is PC member of major conferences (SIGIR, ECIR, CIKM, TPDL, JCDL, WWW) and reviewer for major journals (ACM CSUR, ACM TALIP, ACM TOIS, IEEE TKDE, IPM, JASIST, IR, IS, IJoDL).

He is advisory member of the Information Retrieval Society of India (IRSI), member of the Information Retrieval Specialist Group (IRSG) of the The Chartered Institute for IT (BCS) (former British Computer Society). He was chair of the Steering Committee of the IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries (IEEE TCDL). He is an ACM and IEEE Senior Member.

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