Dr. Ophir Frieder is the IITRI Chair Professor of Computer Science and the Director of the Information Retrieval Laboratory at the Illinois Institute of Technology. His research interests focus on scalable search systems for distributed data. He co-authored three books, was awarded nine patents, published over 100 publications, received research support from and consulted for a variety of governmental and industrial organizations, and has served as the lead technical expert witness is several key intellectual property disputes. In 1993, he received the NSF National Young Investigator Award. Dr. Frieder is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, and IEEE.