Tiziana Catarci received her PhD in Computer Engineering in 1992 from the University of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy, where she is now a full professor. Her main research interests are in theoretical and application oriented aspects of visual formalisms for databases, information visualisation, database design, co-operative information systems, user interfaces, usability, digital libraries, data quality and Web access. On these topics she has published over 150 papers in leading journals and conferences and 20 books. Her contribution can be regarded as one of the first and most significant examples of deep analysis and formalisation of the interaction between the user and the database, which takes in consideration both usability issues and language related aspects. With regard to applications, she has led or participated in various projects on visual query systems, usability studies and developed methodologies for database design. In this respect, several European projects are particularly relevant: KIM, VENUS, FADIVA, LAURIN, SEWASIE,DELOS, Interop, WORKPAD, SM4All, aiming at investigating different aspects of interface design and human-computer interaction. Outside of academia, she has been a consultant to large, private and government organisations. Dr. Catarci is regularly in the programming committees of the main database and human-computer interaction conferences and is associate editor of ACM SIGMOD Digital Symposium Collection (DiSC), VLDB Journal, World Wide Web Journal, and Journal of data Semantics.

Yannis Ioannidis is currently Professor at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Athens. He received his Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 1982, his MSc in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University, and his PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1986. His research interests include database and information systems, digital libraries, personalisation and social networks, scientific systems and workflows, eHealth systems, and human-computer interaction, topics on which he has published over a hundred articles in leading journals and conferences. His research has been funded by various government agencies (USA, Europe, Greece) or private industry in the context of over thirty research projects, including DELOS, BRICKS, DILIGENT, TELplus, PAPYRUS, and DL.org, which have a Digital Libraries focus. Dr. Ioannidis is a "Fellow" of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the recipient of the "Presidential Young Investigator" (PYI) award, of the Very Large Data Bases "10-Year Best Paper Award", and of several awards for teaching excellence. He is currently serving a 4-year term as the Chair of Special Interest Group for the Management of Data (SIGMOD) in ACM and is a member of several scientific advisory boards, including the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and the National Council for Research and Technology of Greece.

Akrivi Katifori, is currently a researcher at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Athens. She holds a B.Sc. in Informatics and Telecommunications (2000), an M.S.c. in "Signal Processing for Telecommunications and Multimedia" (2003) from the University of Athens, and a PhD (2009) from the same department. She has participated in European and national RTD projects and has authored several papers in different research areas of computer science. Her scientific interests include ontologies and semantic web technologies, virtual museums, information visualisation and personal information management.

Georgia Koutrika is a postdoctoral researcher at the Computer Science Department of Stanford University in U.S. She received her PhD in personalisation and databases from the University of Athens' Department of Informatics and Telecommunications in Greece. She has an MSc and BSc from the same university. Georgia is interested in how people can find, visualise and interact with information and services and she has worked on user behaviour and preference modelling, personalisation, recommendations, search,spam, query processing and optimisation. Georgia has served as a PC co-chair of four workshops (in conj. with UM’07, NLDB'08, VLDB'08, and VLDB'09) and as a PC member in several conferences and workshops, including ICDE, WWW, EDBT, and ESWC.

Natalia Manola is Senior Software Engineer holding a B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Athens, Greece, and an M.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, U.S. Her professional experience consists of several years of employment as a Software Engineer, Software Architect, Information Technology Administrator, and Information Technology Project Manager by companies in various Information Technology sectors in the US and Greece. The systems she has designed and implemented include biotechnology and genetic applications, embedded financial monitoring systems, heterogeneous data integration systems and end-user personalised functionalities on digital libraries. She has also participated and technically managed several R&D projects (DRIVER & DRIVER-II, DIAS, COSMOS) funded by the European Union or on a national level.

Andreas Nürnberger studied computer science and economics at the Technical University of Braunschweig. After he received his Ph.D. in computer science from the Otto-von-Guericke-University of Magdeburg in 2001 he moved as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at Berkeley where he worked on adaptive soft computing and visualisation techniques for information retrieval systems. From 2003 he served as Junior Professor for Information Retrieval at Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, and headed the DFG funded Emmy Noether junior research group. Since 2007 he is professor for 'Data and Knowledge Engineering' at the Otto-von-Guericke-University of Magdeburg. His research interests include adaptivity and context in information retrieval systems, multimedia retrieval, machine learning and data mining and soft computing methods, especially neuro-fuzzy systems.

Paul Polydoras received his B.Sc. degree from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications at the University of Athens in 2004. He also received his M.Sc. degree in “Advanced Information Systems” from the same department in 2009. He has also served as architect and developer in the D4Science project responsible for various activities.

Manfred Thaller is Professor of Computer Science for the Humanities ("Historisch-Kulturwissenschaftliche Informationsverarbeitung") at University of Cologne, Germany. He received his PhD in Modern History from the University of Graz in Austria. He did a postdoc fellowship in (empirical) sociology at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna where he specialized in historical mobility studies. He also participated in research projects on the history of the family, study of the daily life of the Middle Ages and interlocking directorates of German and Austrian companies. He was responsible for the design and implementation of a general data base oriented programming system for history, and conducted research on a general methodology of historical computer science. He was the founding director (1997-2000) of the "Humanities Information Technology Research Programme" and the attached research center of the University of Bergen, Norway.