Biographical note

Eduard C. Dragut is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Purdue University, Discovery Park, Cyber Center. He completed his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Chicago in July 2010. His Ph.D. research focused on the integration of deep Web sources that provide/sell similar products/services. His research interests include databases, information retrieval, managing unstructured data, information extraction, opinion mining and retrieval, and Web data management. Projects he is actively pursuing include deep Web integration systems, online record linkage and fusion, large-scale entity disambiguation, creation of a sentiment word dictionary, and recently, cyber-infrastructure for scientific research. Weiyi Meng is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science of the State University of New York at Binghamton. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Chicago in 1992. In the same year, he joined his current department as a faculty member. He is a co-author of two books “Principles of Database Query Processing for Advanced Applications” and “Advanced Metasearch Engine Technology.” He has published over 120 papers. He has served as general chair and program chair of several international conferences and as program committee members of over 50 international conferences. He is on the editorial boards of the World Wide Web Journal, the Frontiers of Computer Science journal, and a member of the Steering Committee of the WAIM conference series. In recent years, his research has focused on metasearch engines, Web data integration, Internet-based Information Retrieval, information extraction, sentiment analysis, and information truthfulness and trustworthiness.He has done pioneering work in large-scale metasearch engines. He was a co-founder of an Internet company (Webscalers) and served as its president. Webscalers developed the world’s largest news metasearch engine AllInOneNews. Clement T. Yu isa professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research interests include multimedia information retrieval, metasearch engine, database management, and applications to healthcare. He has published more than 200 papers in these areas and he is a co-author of two books “Principles of Database Query Processing for Advanced Applications” and “Advanced Metasearch Engine Technology.” He served as chairman of the ACM SIGIR and has extensive experience as a consultant in the fields of query processing in distributed and heterogeneous environments, including document retrieval. He was an advisory committee member for the National Science Foundation and was on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, the Journal of Distributed and Parallel Databases, the International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, and WWW: Internet and Web Information Systems. He also served as the General Chair of the ACM SIGMOD Conference and Program Committee Chair of the ACM SIGIR Conference. He is a co-founder of two Internet companies, Webscalers and PharmIR.