Croft begins term as chair of
Computer Science Department

W. Bruce Croft

he Computer Science Department welcomed a new leader last month as professor W. Bruce Croft began a three-year term as department chair.

     Croft succeeds professor Jim Kurose, who guided the department through its move from the Lederle Graduate Research Center to a new, $14.6 million, state-of-the-art research facility. As chair, Croft will oversee a department with more than 150 graduate students and nearly 300 undergraduate majors, about 40 faculty and more than 80 technical and administrative support staff. During Fiscal Year 2000, Computer Science received more than $10.5 million in external support.

     A member of the Computer Science faculty since 1979, Croft has served for the past nine years as the founding director of the Research Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR), a National Science Foundation-funded collaboration that combines basic research with technology transfer to a variety of government and industry partners.

     Croft's research interests are in several areas of information retrieval, including retrieval models, Web search engines, cross-lingual retrieval, distributed search, question answering, text summarization, and text data mining. He has published more than 120 articles on these subjects.

     Croft has consulted for many companies and government agencies and co-founded a search engine startup in 1996. His research is being used in a number of operational systems.

     He is a member of the National Research Council Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. He was chair of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval from 1987 to 1991. He is currently editor-in-chief of the journal ACM Transactions on Information Systems and an associate editor for another professional publication, Information Processing and Management. He has served on numerous program committees and has been involved in the organization of many workshops and conferences.

     Croft last year was named a Distinguished University Professor by President William M. Bulger. He also received the Research Award from the American Society for Information Science and Technology. In 1997, he was elected a fellow of ACM.

     Croft received his B.Sc. with honors in 1973 from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, where he completed his M.Sc. in computer science a year later. He was awarded a Ph.D. in computer science by the University of Cambridge, England, in 1979.