Research Director of the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University, USA. He is also a part-time professor at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) and at the University of Chile in Santiago.

Previously, he was the Chief Technology Officer at NTENT, a semantic research technology company based in California and, prior to these roles, he was Vice President of Research at Yahoo Labs, based in Barcelona, Spain, and later in Sunnyvale, California, from 2006 to 2016.

He is co-author of the best-selling Modern Information Retrieval Textbook published by Addison-Wesley in 1999 and 2011, which won the ASIST 2012 Book of the Year award. From 2002 to 2004 he was elected to the IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors and from 2012 to 2016 to the ACM Council. Since 2010 he is a founding member of the Chilean Academy of Engineering. In 2009, he was named ACM Fellow and in 2011 IEEE Fellow, among other awards and distinctions.

He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and his areas of expertise are web search and data mining, information retrieval, bias and ethics in artificial intelligence, data science and algorithmics in general.