Ricardo Baeza-Yates - Biography

In 1990 he was promoted to the associate professor level and from 1990 to 1991 he was in charge of the M.Sc. program in Computer Science. As a teacher, he has introduced several new courses on key technologies, including computer graphics (1985), graphical interfaces over X-windows (1990), and object orientation (1991). During this period he continued to do research on algorithms, text retrieval, program animation, and graphical interfaces. Under his guidance, several students have obtained the engineering or M.Sc. degree in computer science. He has obtained several research grants from the National Research Council (CONICYT), private institutions and the government of Spain, closely working with researchers in Brazil, Canada, France, Spain, United States, and Venezuela. He has been visiting professor or invited speaker at several places all around the world, as well as referee of several journals, conferences, NSF, etc. He is member of the ACM, IEEE, EATCS, SIAM and SCCC. 

One of his research projects, jointly with a software house, produced a state-of-the-art text retrieval package for Windows, which obtained the PC-Magazine prize for the best chilean software in 1992. This software, SearchCity, was mentioned in Byte and Communications of the ACM, but the lack of marketing capital aborted this endevour. 

In 1992 he was elected president of the Chilean Computer Science Society (SCCC) for a two year period. During 1993, he was elected chairman for two years of the CS Dept. at the Univ. of Chile and received the Organization of American States (OAS) prize for young researchers in science. During 1994 he received an award from the Institute of Engineers of Chile for the best engineering research trajectory of the past 5 years. He was also reelected as president of the SCCC, position that he held until October of 1995, being reelected again in November of 1996. In April of 1995 was promoted to Full Professor and in September of that year finished his period as chairman. During 1996 he was in sabbatical at the Univ. Politecnica de Catalunya and in 1997 jointly with Eduardo Barbosa and Nivio Ziviani won the Compaq Prize to the best brazilian research article in basic CS. 

In the professional side, he has been Consultant to the National Identification Bureau on imaging technology (1995-1997), on CS education to IBM (1994), on computer architecture to Sonda (DEC distributor in Chile, 1995) and for the Informatization Project of the National Congress (1991-92). He has also been Consultor of IOM (International Organization for Migrations, UN) for the analysis of the Information System of the Chilean National Congress (1990). Also technical assesor for a mid-range computer equipment survey in Chile conducted by Langton-Clarke (1990); and design assesor in several software development projects and commercial systems.