About

Krisztian Balog is a full professor of Computer Science, heading the Information Access and Interaction (IAI) group at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Stavanger. He also works as a Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind.

Balog holds MSc degrees in Computer Science from the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest (2005) and from the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam (2004), and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Amsterdam (2008). He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam (2008-2011) and at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (2011-2012). He joined the University of Stavanger as an Associate Professor in 2013, and was appointed Full Professor in 2016. Before joining Google permanently, Balog spent an extended sabbatical as a Staff Visiting Faculty Researcher there (2018-2020). He also held an Adjunct Professor in AI/NLP position at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (2019-2021).

Balog’s general research interests lie in the use and development of information retrieval, natural language processing, and machine learning techniques for intelligent information access tasks. His current research concerns entity-oriented and semantic search, and novel evaluation methodologies. Balog’s work on expertise retrieval has been very influential and has received numerous awards, including a Best Doctoral Consortium Paper Award at the ACM SIGIR conference in 2007, the Victorine van Schaickprijs in 2009, a Best Paper Award at the ECIR conference in 2011, and a Test of Time Honorable Mention Award at SIGIR 2018. For his significant and influential contributions to the area of semantic search and evaluation methodology, Balog was honored with the Karen Spärck Jones Award in 2018. He is an elected member of the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences (NTVA).

Professional activities

  • Program Committee co-chair (Resource & Reproducibility), 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), 2024
  • Area co-chair (User Modeling and Recommendation), The Web Conference, 2024
  • General co-chair, 44th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), 2022
  • Program Committee co-chair (short papers), 30th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2021
  • General co-chair, 10th International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR), 2020
  • Steering Committee member, International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR) 2020-
  • Program Committee co-chair (full papers), 9th International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR’19), 2019
  • Associate Editor, ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 2015-2020
  • Management committee member, COST Action KEYSTONE, 2013-2017
  • Information director, ACM SIGIR, 2013-2016
  • Labs co-chair, Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2016

(Co-)organizer

Reviewer for International Journals

  • ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD)
  • ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST)
  • ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
  • ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems (TORS)
  • Artificial Intelligence Review (AIRE)
  • Data Knowledge & Engineering (DKE)
  • Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval (FnTIR)
  • IEEE Intelligent Systems
  • IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
  • Information Processing & Management (IPM)
  • Information Retrieval Journal (IRJ)
  • Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR)
  • Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST)
  • Journal of Web Semantics (JWS)
  • Journal on Data Semantics (JODS)
  • Knowledge and Information Systems (KAIS)

Program Committee Member at International Conferences

  • AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2022
    • Senior PC: 2022
  • ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) 2011-2018, 2020, 2022-2024
    • Senior PC: 2015-2017, 2020, 2022-2024
  • ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) 2010-2014, 2016-2025
    • Senior PC: 2020-2025
  • ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) 2007-2023
    • Senior PC: 2013-2023
  • ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR) 2013, 2015-2016, 2021-2024
  • ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) 2010, 2013
  • ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys) 2024
  • Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and Human Language Technologies Conference (ACL-HLT) 2011-2012
  • Design of Experimental Search & Information REtrieval Systems (DESIRES) 2021-2022
  • European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) 2012-2021, 2023-2025
    • Senior PC: 2014-2015, 2017-2021, 2023-2025
  • IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE Big Data) 2013
  • International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) 2010-2011
  • International Conference of the CLEF Initiative (CLEF) 2015-2016
  • International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2016
  • The Web Conference (previously: International World Wide Web Conference) (WWW) 2010-2012, 2017-2021, 2023, 2025
    • Senior PC: 2020, 2023

Program Committee Member at International Workshops

  • Context, Interpretation and Meaning (CIM) at ISWC 2014
  • Cross-lingual Expert Search (CriES) at CLEF 2010
  • Data In Web Search (DISH) at WWW 2013 (advisory board member)
  • Discovering Meaning On the Go in Large & Heterogeneous Data (LHD) at IJCAI 2011, ISWC 2012
  • EntitY REtrieval (EYRE) at CIKM 2018
  • Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval (ESAIR) at CIKM 2012-2014
  • Professional Search (ProfS) at SIGIR 2018
  • Query Representation and Understanding (QRU) at SIGIR 2011
  • Search and Mining Entity-Relationship Data (SMER) at CIKM 2011
  • Schema-agnostic Queries (SAQ) at ESWC 2015
  • Social Aspects of the Web (SAW), 2008-2009
  • Social Personalisation and Search (SPS) at SIGIR 2015
  • Supporting Complex Search Tasks (SCST) at CHIIR 2017
  • Web of Linked Entities (WoLE) at WWW 2013

Reviewer for International Conferences

  • ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2009
  • ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys) 2023
  • ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) 2024
  • ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data/Principles of Database Systems (PODS) 2008
  • Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 2009
  • European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD) 2011
  • International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) 2011
  • Web Intelligence (WI) 2007-2008

Grant and Scholarship Application Committees

  • Reviewer for Interdisciplinary research program in AI, Government of Spain, 2023
  • Member of the evaluation committee for Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, 2017, 2019
  • Member of the evaluation committee for Aalborg University Copenhagen, 2015
  • Reviewer for the Czech Science Foundation, 2013
  • Reviewer for the Danish Council for Independent Research, 2014
  • Reviewer for the Swiss National Science Foundation, 2013

Other Conference Committee Memberships

  • Chair of the Best Paper Awards Committee for ICTIR 2021
  • Best Papers Award Committee for SIGIR 2009, SIGIR 2014, ECIR 2021, CIKM 2023
  • Doctoral Consortium program committee for SIGIR 2009, SIGIR 2015, SIGIR 2016, SIGIR 2018, CIKM 2020
  • Student Mentoring Committee for SIGIR 2009, ECIR 2011, ECIR 2012
  • Tutorials Program Committee for ECIR 2014, SIGIR 2017, ECIR 2018, WSDM 2020, WSDM 2021
  • Workshops Program Committee for SIGIR 2014, ECIR 2015

Awards

  • Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at the 10th ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR), 2024
  • Best Short Paper Award at the 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), 2024
  • Best Resource Paper Award at the 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2023
  • Best Paper Award at the 2nd International Conference on Design of Experimental Search & Information REtrieval Systems (DESIRES), 2021
  • Best Lecturer Award, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Stavanger, 2019
  • Karen Spärck Jones Award, 2018
  • Test of Time Honorable Mention Award at the 41th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), 2018
  • Best Short Paper Honorable Mention Award at the 40th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), 2017
  • Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at the 2nd ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR), 2016
  • Outstanding Reviewer Award at the ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), 2016
  • Best Paper Award at the 33rd European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), 2011
  • Victorine van Schaickprijs 2009 (for PhD dissertation)
  • Best Doctoral Consortium Paper Award at the ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development on Information Retrieval (SIGIR), 2007

See also

Contact

University of Stavanger
Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
NO-4036 Stavanger, Norway
room KE D-430
Email: krisztian (dot) balog (at) uis.no