At the General Assembly of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC) held on 5 December, Ricardo Baeza Yates was appointed as a corresponding member of this academic institution, founded in 1916. The ABC is an independent, non-governmental organization that operates as an honorific scientific society and as a consultant to the government on science policy. The Brazilian Academy of Sciences has been recognized by researchers of the history of science as one of the country’s oldest and certainly one of the most prestigious scientific associations. Its missions, through a rigorous peer-based selection process, include recognizing and encouraging the best researchers from within and without the country.

As Baeza Yates says, “I feel honoured to have been made a corresponding member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and from now on I will feel more connected to this country”. The Academy explains that, in addition to a democratic necessity, diversity is an instrument of efficiency. “In this sense, as researchers, we need to move away from social biases and try actively to build more diverse institutions”, they add.

Ricardo Baeza Yates received his PhD from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada in 1989. He was an ICREA research professor at the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) at UPF from December 2004 until the end of 2010. As of 2011 he became a part-time full professor at the same department in the University. He was the founder of the Web Research Group in 2005, which he directed until 2017, when it was renamed Web Science & Social Computing. He is currently CEO of NTENT in Barcelona and chief technology officer (CTO) of NTENT in California, a semantic search technology company based in California and part-time director of the postgraduate programmes in computer science at North-eastern University in Silicon Valley (USA).

Baeza Yates is co-author of the most cited book on information retrieval (Addison-Wesley, 1999), whose second edition, dating from 2011, was awarded the prize for the best book of the year by the North American Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T).

He has received awards from the Organization of American States (1993), the Institute of Engineers in Chile (1994), the University of Waterloo (Graham Medal, 2007) and from the Association of Engineers in Chile (2010). He has also chaired the Latin American Centre for Studies on Informatics (CLEI), been a director of ACM and IEEE-Computer Society and international coordinator of the applied computing and electronics sub-programme at CYTED (Ibero-American Cooperation Programme). Since 2010 he has been a founding member of the Academy of Engineering of Chile. In 2009 he was appointed ACM Fellow and in 2011 IEEE Fellow. More recently, on 30 October, he collected the Ángela Ruiz Robles Award, one of the national computing awards granted by the Spanish Computer Science Society in recognition of his work in the area of information technology.