Thijs Westerveld has over 10 years of experience in various areas of information retrieval, mostly in an academic setting. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the human media interaction group at the University of Twente in 2004, on the use of generative probabilistic models for multimedia retrieval. Thijs has worked on numerous national and European projects in the areas of information retrieval and multimedia retrieval, and published in international journals and conferences in the field. In 2004, Thijs received the best paper award in the international conference on image and video retrieval (CIVR). He has served as a program committee member for several international information retrieval conferences and he has been a reviewer for international journals in the areas of information retrieval and pattern recognition. His current interests include the combination and integration of information sources for information retrieval in the textual or multimedia domain, language models, and the evaluation of (multimedia) retrieval systems. Since 2006, Westerveld coordinates the multimedia track of the initiative for the evaluation of the initiative for the evaluation of XML retrieval (INEX).