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 managed by an Executive Committee and UKeiG in partnership with the Chemical Information and Computer Applications Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC CICAG); the International Society for Knowledge Organisation UK Chapter (ISKO UK) and the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG).

The Award is given in recognition of an outstanding contribution to the field of information retrieval in its widest sense – thus, for example, including search and data mining – 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;
• development and/or exploitation of new technologies to enhance information retrieval;
• 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 and 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.

2014 Award

The winner of the 2014 Tony Kent Strix Award is Dr Susan Dumais

UKeiG, in association with the International Society for Knowledge Organisation UK and the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group, is delighted to announce that this year’s winner of the UKeiG Tony Kent Strix Award is Dr Susan T Dumais, Distinguished Scientist and Deputy Managing Director as well as Manager of the Context, Learning, and User Experience for Search (CLUES) Group, Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA 98052 USA.

Susan Dumais' research interests include algorithms and interfaces for improved information retrieval, as well as general issues in human-computer interaction. Her current research focuses on gaze-enhanced interaction, the temporal dynamics of information systems, user modeling and personalisation, novel interfaces for interactive retrieval, and search evaluation. She has published widely in the fields of information science, human-computer interaction and cognitive science. Before joining Microsoft in 1997, she was a research scientist at Bell Laboratories and Bellcore, where she worked on latent semantic analysis, methods for combining search and navigation, and the organisational impact of new technology.

Dr. Dumais is a worthy recipient of the 2014 Tony Kent Strix award. For over 30 years, she has been a well-respected leading light in information retrieval - both in terms of research and practice - with sustained contributions that are both innovative and practical. Her significant impact has a range of theoretical, systems, and empirical bases. Dr. Dumais has developed novel algorithms to help people to find, use, and make sense of information. Her research at the intersection of human computer interaction and information retrieval has broad applications for both understanding and improving searching and browsing from the Internet to the desktop. Dr. Dumais has made a number of significant contributions to theory, experimentation, and practice in information retrieval. Perhaps her most significant contribution to date is the co-invention of Latent Semantic Analysis and Indexing (LSI); a key feature of which is its ability to extract the latent conceptual structure from a large collection of texts by analysing the associations between terms that occur in similar contexts, thus enabling a search engine to retrieve using concepts rather than keywords.

Dr. Dumais has had incredible practical influence within Microsoft. She is widely regarded as a thought leader for tackling difficult technical challenges in search and retrieval. During her time at Microsoft, her research has shaped the development of new search technologies in products used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide (e.g., desktop search in Windows, personalisation in Bing). She has been a leader in the information retrieval community for many years: as a former chair of the ACM SIGIR organisation, as program chair for the SIGIR and SIGCHI conferences, and on many editorial boards for the top journals in the field. She has also been highly influential at the U.S. national level, serving on advisory boards for the National Research Council to shape policy, inform public opinion, and advance the pursuit of science.

A presentation will take place during Internet Librarian International 2014.  

All enquiries to awards@ukeig.org.uk