W. Bruce Croft

W. Bruce Croft is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst whose work focuses on information retrieval. He founded the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval in 1991, served as editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Information Systems from 1995 to 2002, chaired the UMass Amherst Computer Science Department from 2001 to 2007, and has been Dean of the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst since 2015. His group developed a series of open-source search engines including InQuery, the Lemur toolkit, Indri, and Galago, and his work on ranking functions and retrieval models, particularly language modeling, made him one of the most cited researchers in information retrieval.