profile
Theo Huibers (1966) has been a researcher for over thirty years, focusing on the topic of Information Retrieval and Child Media Interaction and have acted as a full professor in Human Media Interaction & Computer Science at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. A position he has held since 2002.
Additionally, he is an experienced strategic consultant with broad ICT and AI expertise.
He has published academic papers in the areas of information theory, XML, information retrieval tasks for children, education, social media & citizen participation, publishers, business strategies and different aspects of information retrieval. Furthermore, Huibers is the author of some well-known business books. He has served as a keynote speaker at numerous academic and business conferences. At business-oriented conferences, Huibers is frequently asked to present his ideas on the valorization of academic insights in a business context. Huibers is chairman of the non-executive committee of NEN and Omroep Gelderland.
research
Huibers’ research addresses the broad aspects of information retrieval, including media-related retrieval, and focuses on three specific areas.
The first focuses on the way information retrieval can help children to operate better in the information society by (automatically) fulfilling child-specific information retrieval tasks. Research topics include querying, vertical search, interfacing, and the notion of relevance for children.
The second area focuses on Huibers’ earliest work: ‘a theoretical framework to study information retrieval’. Based on this solid theoretical framework, several aspects of information retrieval have been studied in the last twenty years, including the notion of relevance, the performance of different IR-systems, and -lately- XML-retrieval. The framework will be used to study new aspects of information retrieval, such as information retrieval for children (see the first area).
Finally, the third area of Huibers’ research focuses on combining his academic and business expertise. Together with Professor Dr. J. van Hillegersberg and Dr. Robin Effing from the Department of Information Systems and Change Management of the University of Twente, he supervises research on the novel aspects of social media in relation to citizen participation models.
publications
Jump to: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2015
2024
Does conversation lead to better searches?: Investigating single-shot and multi-turn spoken searches with children (2024)International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction, 41. Article 100668. Beelen, T., Ordelman, R., Truong, K. P., Evers, V. & Huibers, T.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcci.2024.100668Toward Personalised Learning Experiences: Beyond Prompt Engineering (2024)In Proceedings of ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference: Inclusive Happiness, IDC 2024 (pp. 644-649). Association for Computing Machinery. Kruis, J., Pera, M. S., Napel, Z. t., Landoni, M., Murgia, E., Huibers, T. & Feskens, R.https://doi.org/10.1145/3628516.3659367A Conversational Robot for Children’s Access to a Cultural Heritage Multimedia Archive (2024)In Advances in Information Retrieval: 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2024, Glasgow, UK, March 24–28, 2024, Proceedings, Part V (pp. 144–151) (Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Vol. 14612). Springer. Beelen, T., Ordelman, R., Truong, K. P., Evers, V. & Huibers, T.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56069-9_111st Workshop on Information Retrieval for Understudied Users (IR4U2) (2024)In Advances in Information Retrieval - 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2024, Proceedings (pp. 409-414) (Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics); Vol. 14612 LNCS). Springer. Pera, M. S., Cena, F., Huibers, T., Landoni, M., Mauro, N. & Murgia, E.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56069-9_55Good for Children, Good for All? (2024)In Advances in Information Retrieval - 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2024, Proceedings (pp. 302-313) (Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics); Vol. 14611 LNCS). Springer. Landoni, M., Huibers, T., Murgia, E. & Pera, M. S.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56066-8_24
2023
ChatGPT in the Classroom: A Preliminary Exploration on the Feasibility of Adapting ChatGPT to Support Children's Information Discovery (2023)In UMAP 2023 - Adjunct Proceedings of the 31st ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (pp. 22-27). Association for Computing Machinery. Murgia, E., Abbasiantaeb, Z., Aliannejadi, M., Huibers, T., Landoni, M. & Pera, M. S.https://doi.org/10.1145/3563359.3597399Children on ChatGPT Readability in an Educational Context: Myth or Opportunity? (2023)In UMAP 2023 - Adjunct Proceedings of the 31st ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (pp. 311-316). Association for Computing Machinery. Murgia, E., Pera, M. S., Landoni, M. & Huibers, T.https://doi.org/10.1145/3563359.3596996Children’s Trust in Robots and the Information They Provide (2023)In CHI EA '23: Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-7). Article 66. ACM Publishing. Beelen, T. H. J., Velner, E., Truong, K. P., Ordelman, R. J. F., Huibers, T. W. C. & Evers, V.https://doi.org/10.1145/3544549.3585801Where a Little Change Makes a Big Difference: A Preliminary Exploration of Children’s Queries (2023)In Advances in Information Retrieval - 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2023, Proceedings (pp. 522-533) (Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics); Vol. 13981 LNCS). Springer. Pera, M. S., Murgia, E., Landoni, M., Huibers, T. & Aliannejadi, M.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28238-6_43Learning Technologies & AI: Who are we designing for? (2023)In IUI-WS 23. Workshops at the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) 2023 (pp. 250-253) (CEUR workshop proceedings; Vol. 3359). Murgia, E., Landoni, M., Huibers, T. & Pera, M. S.https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3359/How does Information Pollution Challenge Children’s Right to Information Access? (2023)In ROMCIR 2023. Reducing Online Misinformation through Credible Information Retrieval 2023 (pp. 17-29) (CEUR workshop proceedings; Vol. 3406). Landoni, M., Murgia, E., Huibers, T. & Pera, M. S.https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3406/paper2_jot.pdf
2022
Report on the 6th International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children & Recommender and Information Retrieval Systems (KidRec 2022): Workshop at ACM IDC 2022: Information Retrieval Systems for Children in the COVID-19 Era (2022)SIGIR forum, 56(2), 1-5. Huibers, T. W. C., Pera, M. S., Murgia, E., Landoni, M. & Fails, J. A.http://sigir.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/p08.pdfA Child-Friendly Approach to Spoken Conversational Search (2022)In CIKM-WS 2022: Proceedings of the CIKM 2022 Workshops, Atlanta, USA, October 17-21, 2022 (CEUR Workshop Proceedings; Vol. 3318). CEUR. Beelen, T. H. J., Truong, K. P., Ordelman, R. J. F., Velner, E., Evers, V. & Huibers, T. W. C.https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3318/Let's Learn from Children: Scaffolding to Enable Search as Learning in the Educational Environment (2022)[Working paper › Preprint]. ArXiv.org. Landoni, M., Pera, M. S., Murgia, E. & Huibers, T.https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2209.023386th KidRec Workshop: Information Retrieval Systems for Children in the COVID-19 Era (2022)In Proceedings of Interaction Design and Children, IDC 2022 (pp. 696-699). Association for Computing Machinery. Pera, M. S., Landoni, M., Murgia, E., Huibers, T. & Fails, J. A.https://doi.org/10.1145/3501712.3536387Ethical implications for children’s use of search tools in an educational setting (2022)International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction, 32. Article 100386. Landoni, M., Huibers, T. W. C., Murgia, E. & Pera, M. S.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcci.2021.100386Designing Conversational Robots with Children during the Pandemic (2022)[Contribution to conference › Paper] 6th International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children & Recommender and Information Retrieval Systems, KidRec 2022. Beelen, T., Velner, E., Ordelman, R., Truong, K. P., Evers, V. & Huibers, T.https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.11300Have a Clue! the Effect of Visual Cues on Children s Search Behavior in the Classroom (2022)In CHIIR 2022: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (pp. 310-314). Association for Computing Machinery. Landoni, M., Aliannejadi, M., Huibers, T., Murgia, E. & Pera, M. S.https://doi.org/10.1145/3498366.3505845Teachers in a Searchable World: Findings from an Introductory Survey (2022)In Social Justice, Media and Technology in Teacher Education - 27th ATEE Spring Conference, ATEE 2021, Revised Selected Papers (pp. 197-208) (Communications in Computer and Information Science; Vol. 1649). Springer. Murgia, E., Landoni, M., Huibers, T. & Pera, M. S.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20777-8_16The Effect of Prolonged Exposure to Online Education on a Classroom Search Companion (2022)In Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction: 13th International Conference of the CLEF Association, CLEF 2022, Bologna, Italy, September 5–8, 2022, Proceedings (pp. 62-78) (Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Vol. 13390). Springer. Aliannejadi, M., Huibers, T., Landoni, M., Murgia, E. & Pera, M. S.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13643-6_5
2021
Report on the 5th Workshop on International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children & Recommender and Information Retrieval Systems (KidRec 2021) at IDC 2021:: The Teacher Lens (2021)[Other contribution › Other contribution]. ACM SIGIR Forum. Fails, J. A., Landoni, M., Huibers, T. W. C. & Pera, M. S.https://doi.org/10.1145/3527546.3527556Let’s talk about it: Spoken conversational search with a robot for children (2021)In CUI@CSCW: Inclusive and Collaborative Child-facing Voice Technologies: A workshop at the virtual ACM CSCW 2021 conference. ACM Publishing. Beelen, T., Velner, E., Ordelman, R., Truong, K. P., Evers, V. & Huibers, T.The Impact of User Demographics and Task Types on Cross-App Mobile Search (2021)In Flexible Query Answering Systems: 14th International Conference, FQAS 2021, Bratislava, Slovakia, September 19-24, 2021, Proceedings (pp. 223-234) (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence; Vol. 12871). Springer. Aliannejadi, M., Crestani, F., Huibers, T. W. C., Landoni, M., Murgia, E. & Pera, M. S.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86967-0_17Does your robot know? Enhancing children’s information retrieval through spoken conversation with responsible robots (2021)[Contribution to conference › Paper] IR for Children, IR4C 2021. Beelen, T., Velner, E., Ordelman, R., Truong, K. P., Evers, V. & Huibers, T.https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2106.07931IR for Children 2000-2020: Where Are We Now? (2021)In SIGIR '21: Proceedings of the 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (pp. 2689-2692). ACM Publishing. Huibers, T. W. C., Landoni, M., Murgia, E. & Pera, M. S.https://doi.org/10.1145/3404835.3462822Designing a Learning Robot to Encourage Collaboration Between Children (2021)In Design, Learning, and Innovation: 5th EAI International Conference, DLI 2020, Proceedings (pp. 148-168) (Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, LNICST; Vol. 366). Springer. Kaag, W., Theune, M. & Huibers, T.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78448-5_115th KidRec Workshop: Search and Recommendation Technology through the Lens of a Teacher (2021)In IDC '21: Interaction Design and Children (pp. 658-661). Association for Computing Machinery. Landoni, M., Huibers, T. W. C., Pera, M. S. & Fails, J. A.https://doi.org/10.1145/3459990.3460655Right Way, Right Time: Towards a Better Comprehension of Young Students’ Needs when Looking for Relevant Search Results (2021)In UMAP '21: Proceedings of the 29th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (pp. 256-261). ACM Press. Landoni, M., Aliannejadi, M., Huibers, T. W. C., Murgia, E. & Pera, M. S.https://doi.org/10.1145/3450613.3456843All Together Now: Teachers as Research Partners in the Design of Search Technology for the Classroom (2021)In KidRec '21: 5th International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children & Recommender and Information Retrieval Systems: Search and Recommendation Technology through the Lens of a Teacher (KidRec): Co-located with ACM IDC. Murgia, E., Landoni, M., Pera, M. S. & Huibers, T. W. C.https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.03708Somewhere over the Rainbow: Exploring the Sense of Relevance in Children (2021)[Contribution to conference › Paper] 32nd European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics, ECCE 2021. Landoni, M., Huibers, T. W. C., Murgia, E., Aliannejadi, M. & Pera, M. S.https://doi.org/10.1145/3452853.3452885Children's Perspective on How Emojis Help Them to Recognise Relevant Results: Do Actions Speak Louder Than Words? (2021)In 6th ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval: CHIIR 2021 (pp. 301-305). ACM Press. Aliannejadi, M., Landoni, M., Huibers, T. W. C., Murgia, E. & Pera, M. S.https://doi.org/10.1145/3406522.3446058Getting to Know You: Search Logs and Expert Grading to Define Children’s Search Roles in the Classroom (2021)CEUR workshop proceedings, 2950, 44-52. Landoni, M., Huibers, T. W. C., Aliannejadi, M., Murgia, E. & Pera, M. S.Moving Forwards: Using Search Tools on the Classroom (2021)In ATEE Spring Conference 2020/2021 : Social Justice Media and Technology in Teacher Education: Book of Abstracts (pp. 203-205) (Proceedings e report; Vol. 130). Firenze University Press. Murgia, E., Landoni, M., Huibers, T. W. C. & Pera, M. S.https://media.fupress.com/files/pdf/24/7321/21590Report on the 1st IR for Children 2000-2020: Where Are We Now?: (IR4C) workshop at SIGIR 2021: the need to spotlight research on children information retrieval (2021)SIGIR forum, 55(2). Article 11. Landoni, M., Huibers, T. W. C., Murgia, E. & Pera, M. S.https://doi.org/10.1145/3527546.3527560
2020
4th KidRec – What does Good Look Like: From Design, Research, and Practice to Policy (2020)SIGIR forum, 54(2). Landoni, M., Pera, M. S., Fails, J. A., Murgia, E., Kucirkova, N. & Huibers, T. W. C.http://sigir.org/forum/issues/december-2020/You've Got a Friend in Me: Children and Search Agents (2020)In UMAP 2020 Adjunct - Adjunct Publication of the 28th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (pp. 89-94). Association for Computing Machinery. Landoni, M., Huibers, T. W. C., Murgia, E. & Pera, M. S.https://doi.org/10.1145/3386392.3397604Inside Out: Exploring the Emotional Side of Search Engines in the Classroom (2020)In UMAP 2020 - Proceedings of the 28th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (pp. 136-144). Association for Computing Machinery. Landoni, M., Pera, M. S., Murgia, E. & Huibers, T. W. C.https://doi.org/10.1145/3340631.33948474th KidRec Workshop - "what does good look like?": From design, research, and practice to policy (2020)In Extended Abstracts - Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference, IDC 2020 (pp. 103-110). Association for Computing Machinery. Landoni, M., Fails, J. A., Huibers, T. W. C., Kucirkova, N., Murgia, E. & Pera, M. S.https://doi.org/10.1145/3397617.3398057Say it with Emojis: Co-designing relevance cues for searching in the classroom (2020)In CIRCLE 2020 Information Retrieval Communities in Europe 2020: Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the Information Retrieval Communities in Europe (CIRCLE 2020) Samatan, Gers, France, July 6-9, 2020 (CEUR Workshop Proceedings; Vol. 2621). CEUR. Aliannejadi, M., Landoni, M., Huibers, T. W. C., Murgia, E. & Pera, M. S.http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2621/We've only just begun: Children searching in the classroom (2020)In CIRCLE 2020 Information Retrieval Communities in Europe 2020: Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the Information Retrieval Communities in Europe (CIRCLE 2020) Samatan, Gers, France, July 6-9, 2020 (CEUR Workshop Proceedings; Vol. 2621). CEUR. Landoni, M., Huibers, T. W. C., Murgia, E. & Pera, M. S.http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2621/
2019
The Seven Layers of Complexity of Recommender Systems for Children in Educational Contexts (2019)In Proceedings of the Workshop on Recommendation in Complex Scenarios: co-located with 13th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2019) Copenhagen, Denmark, September 20, 2019 (pp. 5-9) (CEUR Workshop Proceedings; Vol. 2449). Association for Computing Machinery. Murgia, E., Landoni, M., Huibers, T. W. C., Fails, J. A. & Pera, M. S.http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2449/Sonny, Cerca! Evaluating the Impact of Using a Vocal Assistant to Search at School (2019)In Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction: 10th International Conference of the CLEF Association, CLEF 2019, Lugano, Switzerland, September 9-12, 2019. Proceedings (pp. 101-113) (Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Vol. 11696). Springer. Landoni, M., Matteri, D., Murgia, E., Huibers, T. & Pera, M. S.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28577-7_6My Name is Sonny, How May I help You Searching for Information? (2019)In IDC '19: Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Interaction Design and Children. Association for Computing Machinery. Landoni, M., Murgia, E., Huibers, T. & Pera, M. S.Relevance and utility in an educational search environment (2019)[Contribution to conference › Paper] 3rd International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children & Recommender and Information Retrieval Systems, KidRec 2019. Huibers, T. & Westerveld, T.3rd KidRec workshop: What does good look like? (2019)In Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Interaction Design and Children, IDC 2019 (pp. 681-688). Association for Computing Machinery. Huibers, T., Fails, J. A., Kucirkova, N., Landoni, M., Murgia, E. & Pera, M. S.https://doi.org/10.1145/3311927.3325162Here, there, and everywhere: Building a scaffolding for children’s learning through recommendations (2019)In ImpactRS 2019: Impact of Recommender Systems 2019: Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on the Impact of Recommender Systems co-located with 13th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (ACM RecSys 2019) (CEUR workshop proceedings; Vol. 2462). CEUR. Milton, A., Murgia, E., Landoni, M., Huibers, T. & Pera, M. S.http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2462/What does good look like?: Report on the 3rd International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children & Recommender and Information Retrieval Systems (KidRec) at IDC 2019 (2019)SIGIR forum, 53(2), 76-81. Huibers, T. W. C., Landoni, M., Pera, M. S., Fails, J. A., Murgia, E. & Kucirkova, N.http://sigir.org/forum/issues/december-2019/When will the promises of search technology in the classroom come trur? (2019)In ICERI2019 Proceedings: 12th annual International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation, 11-13 November, 2019, Seville, Spain (pp. 10409-10415) (International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation (ICERI); Vol. 2019). International Association of Technology, Education and Development (IATED). Murgia, E., Landoni, M., Pera, M. S. & Huibers, T.https://doi.org/10.21125/iceri.2019.2547With a little help from my friends: Use of recommendations at school (2019)In ACM RecSys 2019 Late-breaking Results: Proceedings of ACM RecSys 2019 Late-breaking Results co-located with the 13th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2019) (pp. 61-65) (CEUR Workshop Proceedings; Vol. 2431). CEUR. Pera, M. S., Murgia, E., Landoni, M. & Huibers, T.http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2431/
2018
Children and Search / Recdommendations algorithms: What Adults Need to Know (2018)[Book/Report › Report]. DigilitEY. Kucirkova, N., Fails, J., Pera, S. & Huibers, T. W. C.
2015
Social Media Indicator and Local Elections in the Netherlands: Towards a Framework for Evaluating the Influence of Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook (2015)In Social Media and Local Governments: Theory and Practice (pp. 281-298) (Public Administration and Information Technology; Vol. 15). Springer. Effing, R., van Hillegersberg, J. & Huibers, T.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17722-9_15