Tony Kent Strix Award

The Strix Award is presented in memory of Dr Tony Kent, a past Fellow of the Institute of Information Scientists, who died in 1997. Tony Kent made a major contribution to the development of information science and information services both in the UK and internationally, particularly in the field of chemistry. The name 'Strix' was chosen to reflect Tony's interest in ornithology, and as the name of the last and most successful information retrieval packages that he created.

The Award is given in recognition of an outstanding contribution to the field of information retrieval that meets one of the following criteria:

a major and/or sustained contribution to the theoretical or experimental understanding of the information retrieval process;
development of, or significant improvement in, mechanisms, a product or service for the retrieval of information, either generally or in a specialised field;
development of, or significant improvement in, ease of access to an information service;
a sustained contribution over a period of years to the field of information retrieval; for example, by running an information service or by contributing at national or international level to organisations active in the field.

Nominations are assessed by a panel of judges that includes a number of the past winners. Key characteristics for which they will look are innovation, initiative, originality and practicality. The Award is open to individuals or groups from anywhere in the world.

2011 Award

The 2011 UKeiG Tony Kent Strix Award winner is Professor Alan Smeaton

The Tony Kent Strix Award, given by the UK eInformation Group of CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, has been awarded to Professor Alan Smeaton.

Professor Alan Smeaton of the School of Computing, Dublin City University is a worthy winner of this prestigious award, with sustained contributions in the field of natural language processing techniques for textual information retrieval as well as in the indexing and retrieval of image, audio and video data. He now leads a research team at the University of 40 researchers working in areas including life-logging, video analysis, summarization and search, data aggregation in environmental sensor networks, collaborative search techniques, data fusion from sensor networks and using sensors in media applications. He was founding director for the Centre for Digital Video Processing, a world-leading research centre for video processing and retrieval. Professor Smeaton was also the founding coordinator of TRECVid, which started as an independent evaluation exercise of the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) in 2001 – an initiative that has clearly been instrumental to the progress of the field of digital video retrieval.

The presentation of the ‘Owl’ Trophy and a certificate took place on Monday 24^th October at the Enterprise Search Europe event at the Hilton London Olympia. Martin White (UKeiG Chair), Doug Veal (Chair of the Strix Award Panel and also representing one of our sponsors, the Chemical Information and Computer Applications Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry) and David Hawking, the Keynote Speaker for the opening day, presided over the presentation. They were joined by a representative of the UKeiG Tony Kent Strix Award’s other sponsor, ASLIB.

Doug Veal presents trophy to Alan Smeaton