Ryen W. White is a Partner Research Area Manager at Microsoft Research, where he leads several world-class teams of scientists and engineers comprising the Language and Intelligent Assistance research area. In recent roles, Ryen led the applied science organization for Microsoft Cortana and was chief scientist for Microsoft Health. Ryen's research has historically been focused on understanding search interaction and developing tools to help people search more effectively. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Glasgow, United Kingdom. Ryen has published hundreds of conference papers and journal articles in web search and other areas. He was identified as the "Center of the SIGIR Universe" (most central author in the co-authorship graph) in the 40 years of the ACM SIGIR conference. Ryen has received many best-paper awards in conferences and journals, including three best papers at the ACM SIGIR conference. His book, Interactions with Search Systems, received the ASIS&T Best Information Science book award in 2017. Ryen's doctoral research received the British Computer Society's Distinguished Dissertation Award. In 2014, he received the Microsoft BCS/BCS IRSG Karen Sparck Jones Award for contributions to information retrieval. Ryen co-founded the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human-Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR) and chaired its inaugural steering committee. He was program chair of SIGIR 2017 and The Web Conference 2019. Ryen was co-editor-in-chief of the Information Retrieval Journal (2018-2021), and is now the editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on the Web.
