Croft Appointed Distinguished Professor by Elizabeth Luciano News Office staff Feb. 4, 2000 W. Bruce Croft, a member of the Computer Science faculty, has been appointed a Distinguished Professor by President William M Bulger. The appointment was made Wednesday following approval by the Board of Trustees at its meeting in Boston. The honor recognizes Croft for outstanding academic distinction. Chancellor David K. Scott, Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost Cora B. Marrett, and dean of the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics Linda Slakey recommended him for the honor. "Professor Croft has clearly established himself as a world-renowned leader in a key field of computer science," said Scott. "The University of Massachusetts benefits from the presence of such an eminent scholar. His record of more than 100 publications in benchmark journals and conference proceedings is exemplary." Croft is a highly regarded scholar in the field of information retrieval, and has laid the algorithmic foundations for systems that locate relevant text within large bodies of information, such as encyclopedias or sets of documents such as the World Wide Web. In 1997, he was elected a fellow of the Association of Computer Machinery (ACM) and in 1998, he was appointed to the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council. He has also been a distinguished lecturer at the University of California Irvine, Carnegie-Mellon University, Cornell University, and the ETH in Switzerland. Croft has been particularly successful in linking research results to industrial needs. He is the founder and director of the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR). Funded by the National Science Foundation, this facility has brought together faculty members, research scientists and research staff from more than 70 companies and government agencies to develop applications based on research and to train the next generation of researchers. Croft received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, England, in 1979. He joined the Computer Science faculty that same year and has held the rank of full professor since 1991.