He earned his Ph.D. degree in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Prior joining the University of Pittsburgh in 2004, he served on the research faculties of the Robert Gordon University, Scotland and the University of Maryland at College Park, College Park, MD. His main research interests cover information retrieval (monolingual and multilingual), information access on the social web, adaptive web systems and user modeling, interactive retrieval interface design, web log mining and analysis, and research data management.