Noriko Kando is professor in the Software Research Division of the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, Japan, and Chairma of the NTCIR Project, the leading text-retrieval workshop in the world focussing on Asian languages. Professor Kando initiated the large-scale evaluation of Japanese-language information retrieval in 1999, and been the principal designer of many of the tasks that are used for evaluations in the continuing workshops, including patent retrieval. Professor Kando received her PhD from Keio University in Library and Information Science in 1995 and has been teaching and conducting research at NII since that time. She is author of numerous scientific articles and has been an invited speaker at many international conferences.