A little more detail

Ricardo Baeza-Yates is the Director of the Yahoo! Research Labs in Barcelona, Spain and Santiago, Chile. Prior to joining Yahoo! Research, Ricardo was the Director of the Center for Web Research at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Chile; and ICREA Professor at the Department of Technology of the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He maintains ties with both universities as a part-time professor, leveraging his affiliations with both to collaborate on joint research.

• Yahoo!’s page on Ricardo
• Interesting blog interview with Ricardo

Morten currently serves as the Director of User Experience of the web-enabled-TV startup Joost. He is a developer and architect of user centered applications, interactive training and human factors. In a previous life, Morten worked on training applications for air crews and air traffic controllers.

Kars is an interaction designer passionate about playful, social and mobile user experience. He is currently living and working in Copenhagen, offering his services freelance to companies and agencies in (mobile) web and physical computing.

Kars also teaches mobile game design at the Utrecht School of Arts’ comprehensive Game Design & Development course. Currently on a sabbatical, he is employed by the oldest still independent web agency of the Netherlands, Info.nl, where he designs online services that offer real value for customers and companies.

Peter is male, 37, and he lives in a warehouse in Amsterdam that was built in 1720 (but remodeled more recently). At university he combined computer science with ergonomics and came up with information ergonomics, which he applied to workflow software. He has been working in the user experience (UX) field since 1995 and is currently the senior Interaction Designer at long-standing web agency Info.nl. Peter is an active contributor to HCI, IA and UX conferences and mailinglists. He served on the Board of Advisors of the IA Institute, helped organize the IA Summits of 2004-2007 as well as the 2005-2007 EURO IA summits. He has been the host of Amsterdam IA Cocktail Hours since 2001. Peter maintains a blog called "[BEEP]" at http://www.peterboersma.com/blog/.

Scott Confer is User Experience Manager at Sears Holdings Corporation in Chicago where he supports the online businesses relating to service: Manage My Home.com, Product Services, Home Services, Communities, Brands, and Contract Sales. The Sears portfolio includes K-Mart, Land’s End, The Great Indoors, and Orchard Supply Hardware, in addition to a $10B (USD) services set of products. Scott’s focus at Sears is to apply emerging technology to help make everyday life and home ownership a pleasure.

Previously Scott was an Information Architect at Orbitz Worldwide, supporting mission-critical back-end tools, designing consumer storefronts, and researching novel interfaces and social web experiences. He also has business experience and training as an ergonomist.

Scott Confer has a Master’s degree in Psychology (1998) from the University of Idaho in Experimental Psychology: Human Factors with HCI emphasis. He has a BA in psychology from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Jonathan Culling is an information architect, user researcher and creative lead with 11 years of online media experience. Clients have been mostly from financial services, travel, telecommunications, and entertainment sectors. He is heading up user experience division for DLKW, a Covent Garden based advertising agency. He previously worked at Sapient and Agency.com. His goals are to continue to lead large teams and to provide the creative vision for large-scale projects.

Fran is a senior usability analyst at Nomensa where she has led information architecture projects for public sector, academic and commercial clients. She has solved problems for merging organisations, international companies with multiple sites, educational institutes and local authorities.

Starting out as a consumer psychologist for Unilever, Fran's first step into commercial usability testing was the evaluation of viral marketing websites for the Lynx (Axe) brand, including a set of virtual mixing decks. Fran ran her first card sorting study in 1998 then developed some alternative 'category research tools' using response time data to understand users' implicit mental models of websites and brands.

Fran holds a Masters degree in the design and evaluation of advanced interactive systems and a degree in Psychology with European study (French). More recently Fran’s attention has been drawn towards information architecture and accessibility, design strategies for museums and libraries, behaviour change psychology, metadata schema and search strategies.

Thomas J. Froehlich holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Duquesne University and Master’s in Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh. The majority of his published work is concerned with ethical considerations in the information professions, evolving in part from his educational training. Dr. Froehlich is Director of the Master of Science Program in Information Architecture and Knowledge Management at Kent State University. He is also a professor in the School of Library and Information Science where he teaches in the areas of information architecture, knowledge management, information science, ethics, network and software resources, online searching, and user interface design.

Ariel has been working in de User Experience field since 1996, first in The Netherlands and since 2002 in Spain, where he is a partner of Multiplica, a well established interaction design firm with offices in Barcelona, Madrid and Santiago de Chile.
His main professional goal is to connect businesses’ strategic objectives with users’ needs to create interactive products that are useful, profitable and enjoyable to use.
He holds a degree in information and media management and has several years of experience as a lecturer in universities in Spain, The Netherlands and Argentina.

Are Gjertin Urkegjerde Halland is a senior Information Architect with NetLife Research in Oslo, Norway. Over the last 11 years he has designed search and navigation interfaces and consulted to a number of high profiled clients, including BI College, Bank of Norway, the Norwegian Defence, Norge.no, Vinmonopolet and Telenor. He holds a master in Media and Communication from the University of Oslo, where his master thesis was entitled "Navigation as Rhetoric - Effective Communication in Governmental Websites". Are is a local ambassador for UXnet in Norway.

Margaret Hanley has worked as an Information Architect for more than 10 years on three continents. Margaret is currently the Executive Producer of Core Products for bbc.co.uk, managing a set of IA related products like search, homepage and Programme Information Pages. While working as an IA at the BBC, she developed content models and controlled vocabularies to describe everything from "Composer of the Week" to traffic updates on the Nottingham WIL site. Prior to joining the BBC, she served as Senior Information Architect at Ingenta in Oxford. In the United States, Margaret was a project manager for Argus Associates, concentrating on the development of deep information architecture for corporate web sites. Clients included Microsoft, IBM, Square D and LookSmart.

Nils Arne Hove has worked as an IT consultant since early 1980's. He trained as an IT engineer and received his degree from Bergen in 1984. He has worked as a programmer and system developer at Kommunedata Vestlandet, later NIT and IBM until 1999.

At Vestlandsforsking he has worked mostly as a systems developer, especially focusing on internet solutions using XML and related standards. Recently, he has been working with information- and system architecture and semantics with the use of Topic Maps.

Alex is Dutchman who was born and raised in Germany. In 1990, he moved to the Netherlands to study computer science at the University of Twente.

With his Master of Science degree in hand, he built up work experience as a consultant at CMG and Addend, a small e-Business company. Today, he is a tutor at the Hogeschool Utrecht, a University of Applied Science. One of the subjects he teaches is information architecture, in which he spoils lots of students with his invention that he called Universal information architecture Modelling Language (UiaML).

James Kalbach holds a degree in library and information science from Rutgers University, as well as a master’s in music theory and composition. He is currently a Human Factors Engineer with LexisNexis and previously served as head of information architecture with Razorfish Germany. James is an active speaker and author on information architecture and usability in Germany, where he has cofounded an IA community. He is also author of the newly published Website Navigation (O’Reilly, 2007).

Joe Lamantia has been active in user experience and information architecture for ten years as a designer, strategist, consultant, entrepreneur, writer and speaker. He postponed graduate school in the mid-90s in order to investigate the internet from the inside, and has been building and designing information environments of all sizes and complexities ever since. He spends too much time blogging about information architecture, user-centered design, enterprise technology, social systems, culture, user research, and other such things at Joelamantia.com

Andrea Resmini is an architect and information architect. An IT professional since 1989, he's been a teaching assistant of generative design at the Politecnico di Milano, Faculty of Architecture and he's now a partner at exea, a small IT consulting firm in Italy. He's also a Ph.D. candidate in History and Informatics at the Department of History, University of Bologna and a visiting researcher at JIBS in Jönköping, Sweden.

Luca Rosati (http://lucarosati.it) is a freelance Information Architect and assistant professor in Informatics for Humanistic Science (i.e. Information Architecture and Human Computer Interaction) at University for Foreigners of Perugia, in Italy. He spoke at several international conferences, and manages Trovabile (http://trovabile.org) an Italian magazine devoted to IA (Trovabile is a calque on the English Findable). Luca published the books "Organizing Knowledge. From Libraries to Information Architecture for the Web" (Milan, 2006), and "Information Architecture from Everyday Things to the Web" (Milan, 2007).

Claire is a consultant with Seren Partners. She has over 9 years’ experience in user experience design, including primary user research, interaction design and information architecture and usability testing. Prior to joining Seren, she worked at Flow Interactive, where she conducted over 200 user research sessions, and has worked in senior information architecture/interaction design roles for companies including Razorfish, Credit Suisse, LexisNexis and the Press Association. Claire has a BSc (Hons) degree in Psychology and Philosophy and an MSc in Interactive Multimedia Production. She runs the London IA mailing list for information architects.

Stanislaw works at the Library and Information Science Institute at Akademia Pedagogiczna (Pedagogical University in Crakow, Poland). He is a freelance information architect, university lecturer, and researcher in information science. He received his PhD in library and information science in 2004. He published a book (in Polish) devoted to information seeking behaviour in educational web site Uzytkownicy systemow hipertekstowych (Users of Hypertext Systems. Crakow 2006). Stanislaw is currently researching the usability of libraries and educational web pages, users’ search strategy. He also teaches information architecture and the design of web pages.

Peter Van Dijck is an independent information architecture consultant, and author of the book "Information architecture for designers". He has developed information architectures for clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to internet startups. Peter is passionate about things that have been known to put angry adult African elephants to sleep, like the internationalization of information architecture and the co-construction of users and technology. Peter’s website is at http://petervandijck.com.

Bogo Vatovec has more than 15 years of experience in change management, user experience, project management, software engineering and knowledge engineering.

He is a well known speaker and presenter at conferences in Europe, USA, Israel, England, and New Zealand, a senior member of the Society for Technical Communication (STC), a recipient of the STC Distinguished Chapter Award and a manager of the STC Information Design and Architecture Special Interest Group (SIG.)

Giorgio Venturi is a user experience architect with more than six years of international consulting experience. He has helped his clients to tackle their user experience challenges by focusing on user requirements, rapid prototyping and usability.

He has been a research fellow in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at the University of Bedfordshire and in Thales Naval Netherlands. He presented his work at several international peer-reviewed conferences and journals. His website is usercentred.net. His biggest dream is that information architecture and user experience become so highly known by the masses that he doesn't have to spend (typical!) incredible amounts of energy to explain his job.

Susan is a User Experience Architect based in London working with leading digital design agency LBi. She has worked with a range of clients in healthcare, retail, telecommunications and government agencies. Susan has experience of developing browser based, mobile and desktop application solutions. For the past year she has worked with a healthcare client focusing on user research, and the experience design of an application called the Map of Medicine, and its associated suite of products. She was educated in Ireland at the University of Limerick and the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.

As Information Architect with Orbitz Worldwide, Joanna Wiebe works to create exceptional travel interactions. Orbitz Worldwide serves travelers, travel professionals and suppliers in 130 countries with brands such as Orbitz® for Business, Orbitz.com, ebookers.com®, CheapTickets®, HotelClub.com®, RatesToGo.com®, Travelbag® and the Away Network®.

Previously, Joanna Wiebe was Information Architect for McGill Digital Solutions, where she architected Flash-based interactive elearning solutions, kiosks and web applications for Fortune 500 clients. This followed an 11-year career at her interactive design firm OneMind Inc, during which time she was design lead for the user interface for GE Healthcare clinical and administrative healthcare applications now in wide use in US and United Kingdom. Ms. Wiebe is anticipating 2007 completion of her Master of Distance Education degree, specializing in international issues, from Athabasca University, Alberta, Canada. She is a Registered Graphic Designer since 1997 in Ontario, Canada.

Olly Wright is Experience Architecture Director at Media Catalyst Amsterdam, where he is responsible for a wide range of web and mobile projects, including sonyericsson.com. He has been making web sites for more than ten years. Previously he obtained a degree in philosophy in London, where he was told that Darwin has nothing to do with ethics. He disagrees. He blogs at ollywright.org.

Svein Ølnes has more than 10 years of experience as project manager for various IT projects at Western Norway Research Institute (Vestlandsforsking). Many of these projects deal with the use of IT in public sector (eGovernment). The projects involve both munipalities and government agencies.

In recent years, the use of metadata in web sites for better structure and findability has been a main issue. Several projects have been carried out using Topic Maps both as a technology but not at least as a way of modelling web sites. The question of where traditional information architecture meets the more generic information structures established through modelling with for instance Topic Maps, is at time one of the most interesting issues.