Noticias

Ricardo Baeza-Yates is inducted as a Full Member of the Chilean Academy of Sciences.

June, 2022 – In recognition of his outstanding scientific career, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, a faculty member of the DCC U. Chile and senior researcher at the Millennium Institute Foundations of Data, was inducted as a Full Member of the Chilean Academy of Sciences, an entity that brings together the most distinguished scientists in the country. “It means being one of the 36 most outstanding Chilean scientists according to the Academy, where one is proposed and elected by its members. Factors such as research trajectory, impact, awards, active participation in various sectors of society, etc., are taken into account,” expressed the academic.

This recognition makes him the first computer science scientist to be inducted as a Full Member. “I receive this news very happily, although it is something that could have happened earlier, as I have been a Corresponding Member for twenty years despite being one of the five most cited Chileans on Google Scholar. Surely the fact that I am not permanently in Chile and that I am not from one of the traditional sciences, delayed this recognition.”

Ricardo Baeza-Yates holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, Canada. He has a broad and distinguished career in the field of computer science both in Chile and internationally. He is currently the Director of Research at the Experiential Artificial Intelligence Institute of Northeastern University in the United States, as well as a part-time Full Professor in the Information and Communication Technologies Departments at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and Computer Science at the University of Chile, where he is also a Senior Researcher at the Millennium Institute Foundations of Data (IMFD). Between 2006 and 2016, he was Vice President of Research at Yahoo! Labs, first from Barcelona and then in Sunnyvale, California; and between 2019 and 2023, he was part of the Spanish State’s Artificial Intelligence Advisory Council. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest scientific and educational computing society.

His research interests include algorithms and data structures, information retrieval, web search and data mining, as well as data science. He has received the Salvà i Campillo Award for Outstanding Personality for his contributions to the promotion of ICT, awarded in Catalonia, and the Latin American Merit Award in Informatics, awarded by the Latin American Center for Studies in Informatics (CLEI). He is the author of numerous scientific publications and co-author of “Modern Information Retrieval,” the most cited book in information retrieval.

Based on this trajectory, Ricardo Baeza-Yates provides his vision of computing today, stating that “in the last thirty years the discipline has matured a lot in the world and in Chile. 34 years ago, when I returned from my doctorate, there were less than 20 doctors in computing in about five universities in Chile. Today we have already passed the hundred doctors in most universities, in part with the creation of local doctoral programs, where the DCC U. Chile was the pioneer and where I graduated the first doctor in computer science, Gonzalo Navarro. The current main challenge is to reinforce top-level research in computing that continues to be concentrated in the main universities of the country.”