Biography

Ryen White is a Partner Research Area Manager at Microsoft Research, leading the Language and Intelligent Assistance research area. He is also an Affiliate Full Professor at the University of Washington. Recently, Ryen led the applied science organization for Cortana and was chief scientist at Microsoft Health.
Ryen is also editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on the Web and they are launching the ACM SIGIR Academy to recognize individuals' contributions to information retrieval.
Ryen's book Interactions with Search Systems received the 2017 ASIST Best Information Science Book Award.
He was technical program co-chair for the 28th Web Conference (WWW 2019), held in San Francisco in May 2019.
Ryen received the 2014 Microsoft BCS/BCS IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award for contributions to information retrieval.
He was also program co-chair for SIGIR 2017, the top search conference. At SIGIR 2017, Ryen was identified as "Center of the SIGIR Universe," for being the author most central in the co-authorship graph in the 40 years of the ACM SIGIR conference.
Ryen was founding chair of the series of ACM SIGIR Conferences on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR), pronounced "cheer."
He received the SIGIR 2013 Best Paper Award for Beliefs and Biases in Web Search.
His group received the SIGIR 2010 Best Paper Award for their paper "Assessing the Scenic Route: Measuring the Value of Search Trails in Web Logs". They also received the SIGIR 2007 Best Paper Award for their paper "Studying the Use of Popular Destinations to Enhance Web Search Interaction".
Ryen also received the British Computer Society's (BCS) Distinguished Dissertation Award for the best Computer Science PhD dissertation in the United Kingdom for 2005. He is a Fellow of the BCS.