Dr. Roelof van Zwol joined Yahoo! Research Barcelona in August 2006, where he is heading a Multimedia group. The focus of the research is on media interaction, mining and search. Furthermore, his research activities include geographic information retrieval. He obtained his PhD. degree from the Database group at University of Twente, the Netherlands on the topic of "Modelling and Searching Web-based Document Collections."

Prior to joining Yahoo! Research, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Information and Computing Sciences at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, where his work focused on Spatial Information Retrieval, and (Multimedia) XML retrieval, and social search.

His primary research interests include: social media, multimedia, user generated content, information retrieval, databases, and GIS. He is also active in the SEMEDIA european project on "Search Environments for Media" as the technical coordinator.