nivio ziviani belo horizonte brazil august 27 1946 is a professor emeritus at the department of computer science of the federal university of minas gerais ufmg he has a phd in computer science from the university of waterloo canada 1982 nivio ziviani is well known for his research in computer science mainly focused on information retrieval algorithms and web recommender systems as can be seen in his dblp and google scholar he is member of the brazilian academy of sciences and the in 2011 he received the prize of scientific merit of the brazilian computer science society he has erds number 2nivio ziviani is author of the following books about algorithms projeto de algoritmos com implementaes em pascal e em c cengage learning isbn 9788522110506 third edition 2010 in portuguese diseo de algoritmos com implementaciones en pascal y cthomson learning isbn 9788497325387 2007 in spanish translated from the portuguese version projeto de algoritmos com implementaes em java e c thomson learning isbn 8522105251 second edition 2007 in portuguesehe was the creator of one of the first search engines he cofounded the miner technology group in 1998 which was acquired by group folha de so paulo uol in 1999 and a search engine company called akwan information technologies in 2000 which was acquired by google inc in 2005 an acquisition that became worldwide news with akwan google bootstrapped its rd center for latin america which is located in belo horizonte nowadays he is also cofounder and the chairman of the board of zunnit technologies a startup company focused on software for recommending items of interest to web users and cofounder of neemuat ufmg he coordinates the laboratory for treating information latin and is cofounder of the information retrieval group at ufmg he has coauthored over 100 refereed papers and 2 books in algorithm design and information retrieval the latter his primary area of research nivio ziviani was the general cochair of the 28th acm sigir conference on research and development in information retrieval and cofounder and member of the steering committee of the international conference on string processing and information retrieval spire