Ricardo Baeza-Yates, a University of Waterloo PhD computer science alumnus, has received the Ángela Ruiz Robles Award for research excellence and entrepreneurship in computer engineering.
Baeza-Yates is a former ICREA professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, where he founded and directed the Web Research Group. He has been the chief technical officer of NTENT Hispania since 2017 and the chief technical officer of NTENT in California since 2016. Additionally, he has been a professor at Universidad de Chile since 1985, where he founded and directed the Center for Web Research.
“Congratulations to Ricardo for this well-deserved award,” said Mark Giesbrecht, Director of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. “Throughout his career, Ricardo has been leading research in informational retrieval, semantic search and data science, while promoting knowledge transfer and expanding commercial opportunities in computer science.”
Baeza-Yates holds several patents and has authored or coauthored more than 500 publications, among them Modern Information Retrieval, the most widely used textbook on search. He was the 2007 recipient of the J.W. Graham Medal in Computing and Innovation, an award given annually by the University of Waterloo and its Faculty of Mathematics to recognize leadership and innovative contributions to the University of Waterloo and the Canadian computer industry.
Conferred by the Scientific Computing Society of Spain and the BBVA Foundation, the Ángela Ruiz Robles Award is given for institutional, corporate or individual activities that advance research or entrepreneurship in computing engineering and stimulate innovation, technology transfer and employment creation. The award takes its name from Ángela Ruiz Robles, a Spanish teacher, writer, pioneer and inventor of the mechanical encyclopedia — a device that was the precursor to the e-book.
