Monica Landoni is a Senior Researcher at the Faculty of Informatics at Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI). She has worked on a number of national and European projects, including PuppyIR, investigating how technology can support children when searching, writing and reading for education and pleasure. While doing that she has happily survived the design and running of many collaborative design sessions in formal and informal settings. Carefully taking into account the different needs, requests, roles and points of views of parents, teachers, librarians; always putting children first.
Emiliana Murgia is a primary school teacher at the Stoppani Institute in Milan, where she works on developing and experimenting innovative teaching methods with technology. She is also affiliated to the Department of Human Sciences for Education at the University of Milano Bicocca. Emiliana has worked on many national projects investigating how technology can support children so that they can get the best out of their learning experience. Emiliana is also a co-organizer of the KidRec workshop.
Maria Soledad Pera is an Associate Professor in the CS Department at Boise State University. Sole’s research focuses on IR, in particular IR for non-traditional users, such as children, educators, and individuals affected by mental health disorders. Her work related to IR applications tailored towards children has been funded by the National Science Foundation. She has served as PC and reviewer for IR conferences and journals, including SIGIR and RecSys; she was General Chair of ACM RecSys 2018. Sole is one of the co-organizers of the KidRec workshop, currently in its 4th edition.
Theo Huibers has been researching IR and human media interaction for over 30 years. Since 2002, he is a professor in Human Media Interaction & Computer Science at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and co-founder of an international edTech company called Wizenoze, founded in 2013. Huibers co-initiated a European FP7 research project called PuppyIR in 2008. This international project was granted 4.3M euro from the European Commission for a 3 years study (2009-2012) on all aspects (e.g. ethics, data-gathering technology and business models) of developing an open-source search and media environment for children.