Bruce Croft Named a Fellow of IEEE

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Bruce Croft
Bruce Croft

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) recently named Bruce Croft, first dean and Distinguished Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), a Fellow of IEEE, an honor which recognizes members “with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest.”

Croft is an expert in information retrieval (IR) who retired from faculty responsibilities in 2018 to focus on research as director of the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR), which he founded in 1992. IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement.

He says of the honor, “Even though I have been working in research for many years, it is always a great pleasure to be recognized by my colleagues. It is also an opportunity to acknowledge that nearly all of my work was done in collaboration with outstanding students at UMass Amherst.”

CICS Dean Laura Haas adds, “Bruce’s elevation to IEEE Fellow is a recognition of his exemplary contributions to the field of information retrieval during his almost 40 years as a UMass Amherst faculty member, as well as the advances he continues to make in the area of conversational search. I would say that this honor caps off a brilliant career, but it seems that Bruce and the CIIR keep on innovating.”

CIIRis recognized as one of the world's leading IR research groups. Under Croft's direction, the center has produced over 1,000 publications and 75 Ph.D. students, involved 18 faculty and 515 CIIR personnel, worked with over 100 industry/government members, and received over $75 million in funding. In addition to producing significant fundamental research advances, the CIIR has been involved in many innovative industry collaborations.

Croft’s research has focused on retrieval models, document representation, web search, query processing, cross-lingual retrieval and search architectures. He has published more than 250 articles on these and other subjects.

Croft’s work has been instrumental in the advances of IR and search engine technology. His group has won five ACM SIGIR Test of Time Awards and two SIGIR Test of Time Honorable Mentions. He has also received a number of career awards for pioneering research, including the ACM SIGIR Gerard Salton Award, the UKeiG Tony Kent Strix Award, the ASIST Research Award, the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award, and the UMass Amherst Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Research and Creative Activity. Croft is a Fellow of the ACM since 1996 and was Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Information Systems.

Croft came to UMass Amherst in 1979 after receiving his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Cambridge. He was the chair of the Department of Computer Science from 2001–2007 and the first dean of CICS from 2015–2017.

The IEEE is the world’s leading professional association for advancing technology for humanity. Through its 400,000 plus members in 160 countries, the association is a leading authority on a wide variety of areas ranging from aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power and consumer electronics.