Keynotes
Keynote #1
University of Amsterdam
Mohammad is an Assistant Professor at IRLab, University of Amsterdam. His research interests include conversational information access, evaluation, and recommender systems. He is an active member of the IR community, regularly publishing and serving as an (S)PC in top venues such as SIGIR, CIKM, WSDM, TheWebConf, ECIR, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, and others. Mohammad received the ACM SIGIR Early Career Researcher award in 2025. He has co-organized various evaluation campaigns, including TREC CAsT, TREC iKAT, LLMJudge, ConvAI3, XMRec, and IGLU, focusing on diverse aspects of user interaction with conversational agents and recommender systems.
Keynote #2
Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell’Informazione “A. Faedo” (ISTI-CNR)
Cristina Ioana Muntean is a Senior Researcher at the Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell’Informazione “A. Faedo” (ISTI-CNR) in Pisa, Italy, where she works within the High Performance Computing (HPC) Lab focusing on Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and related applications. Cristina contributed extensively to research on information retrieval models focusing on the intersection of efficient data processing, intelligent search models, and conversational systems. Her contributions include work on efficiency, caching, and query performance prediction in conversational search settings. Cristina is an active participant in leading information retrieval research communities. She has published extensively in venues such as SIGIR, ECIR, CIKM, and ACM Transactions, and is actively involved in the IR research community through program committee service. She has served in organizational roles for workshops focused on mixed-initiative conversational systems and reproducibility studies in IR.