Author: Giovanni Maria Sacco

Giovanni Maria Sacco is Associate Professor of Information Systems and HCI with the Department of Informatics, University of Torino, Italy. Before that, he had worked at Purdue University, at the IBM San Jose Research Lab (in the System-R group), and at the University of Maryland, among others. Sacco”s work on security with Dorothy Denning was the first attack on key distribution protocols and one of the bases of MIT’s Kerberos. His work with Mario Schkolnick on buffer management for relational database systems introduced predictive buffer management. He introduced fragmentation, later known as recursive hash partitioning, the first sub-sort/merge join method, which is widely implemented in industry. Since the 80’s he has been active in the area of Information Retrieval, in which he led research and industrial projects. He introduced dynamic taxonomies (aka faceted search) and has published over 25 papers on this topic. He also holds several US patents in information technology. Yannis Tzitzikas is Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Crete (Greece) and Associate Researcher in Information Systems Lab at FORTH-ICS (Greece). Before joining Uof Crete and FORTH-ICS, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Namur (Belgium) and ERCIM postdoctoral fellow at ISTI-CNR (Pisa, Italy) and at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. His research interests fall in the intersection of the following areas: Information Systems, Information Indexing and Retrieval, Conceptual Modeling, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and Collaborative Distributed Applications. His current research revolves around faceted metadata and semantics (theory and applications), the P2P paradigm (focusing on conceptual modelling issues, query evaluation algorithms and automatic schema integration techniques), and flexible interaction schemes for information bases. The results of his research have been published in more than 45 papersin refereed international conferences and journals, and he has received two best paper awards (at CIA’2003 and ISWC’07).