Dr. Claudiu Firan is a Senior Researcher at the L3S Research Center in Hanover, Germany. His main research interests include Information Search and Retrieval on large scale data sets in the Web, and in multimedia systems, Web 2.0 applications and social networks. He holds a PhD in Information Retrieval from the University of Hanover, Germany, under the supervision of Prof. Wolfgang Nejdl. Prior to this, he studied Computer Science at the Polytechnics University of Bucharest, Romania.