Press Releases
The 2009 Tony Kent Strix Award winner is Carol Ann Peters
14 January 2010: 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 Carol Ann Peters of Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologia dell'Informazione “A. Faedo” .
Carol was nominated for her work on the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF), the world's leading forum for evaluating cross language searching systems, which Carol initiated and has run for ten years. This annual evaluation exercise has attracted a multi-disciplinary network of researchers to collaborate on shared tasks, to contribute to the CLEF testing resources, and to meet annually to present and discuss results. In its opening year, CLEF counted 20 participants; thanks to Carol's hard work, CLEF has expanded year on year to become a major international event in information retrieval related research: in 2009 it attracted over 130 registrations from individual researchers and leading research groups from Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the Americas.
The nomination noted that none of this would have happened had it not been for Carol Peter's initiation and continued drive to run and maintain CLEF. Carol's tireless work with CLEF has driven the information retrieval community to consider search in more than just the English language that previously dominated information retrieval research; thus she has made an enormous contribution to the awareness and understanding of information retrieval.
Initially, like most of the search evaluation exercises, CLEF adopted a ‘pooled test collection' approach to evaluation that was adopted by other well known evaluation exercises like TREC. However, again, thanks to Carol's leadership, CLEF has explored and indeed continues to investigate extensions to this basic model and the development of new metrics for new tasks so as to provide a multifaceted approach to performance evaluation. It is difficult to encapsulate here the huge impact of CLEF. CLEF's academic output is strong, as evidence by the nearly 3,500 citations to the hundreds of papers presented at CLEF workshops. Multilingual search is garnering more interest in professional circles, where previously nationally-based work tasks have been extended to have international scope. As part of a long term plan to consider future directions, Carol has secured funding through a large number of consecutive EC projects, including the latest ‘TrebleCLEF' project, which kept CLEF going and provided funding to hold a series of workshops where CLEF partners engaged with researchers and key industrial contacts in order to understand better how CLEF's outputs were impacting on a series of communities and areas. Carol Peter's contributions to information retrieval have been many and wide ranging, covering all of the areas for which the Tony Kent Strix Award is offered.
The Tony Kent Strix Award is presented each year 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 both in the UK and internationally, particularly in the field of chemistry. The award is offered in recognition of individuals or groups for an outstanding contribution, practical innovation or achievement in the field of information retrieval. A call for nominations for the 2010 awards will be issued later in the year.
JISC Funding postponement
The recent grant letter from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) to HEFCE means that HEFCE has to give careful consideration as to how funding reductions arising from the grant letter will be passed on to the organisations they fund.
In the light of the grant letter, HEFCE has asked that JISC make no further commitments of capital funds ahead of the HEFCE board meeting on 28 January 2010 at which decisions on funding allocations will be made.
With this in mind, JISC is postponing all current capital funded calls and invitations to tender (ITTs) from today 5 January 2010, pending the HEFCE board decision and will regrettably not be issuing any new capital funded calls or ITTs until the funding situation is clearer.
What this means is that any capital funded ITT or funding call which has been issued but for which grant letters have not yet been issued, will be put on hold until after the HEFCE board meeting on 28 January 2010.
The ITTs and calls which are affected by this announcement are:
Managing research data grant funding call 14/09
Developing community content grant funding call 13/09 - this postponement relates to strand 2 of this call only, please note that strand 1 of this call is unaffected.
If you have questions about whether a bid to an ITT or call you are working on at the moment is affected by this announcement, please email funding@jisc.ac.uk .
JISC announces Intute funding cut
December 16th, 2009
We regret to inform our users and contributors that JISC has announced that its funding for Intute will be cut with effect from August 2010. It is JISC policy that, wherever possible, services move from being fully funded by JISC to being sustainable by other means. Unfortunately in the current economic climate no realistic alternative funding model for Intute as it currently stands has been identified.
Despite this JISC has acknowledged the pioneering work of Intute, its value to the community, and the insights it has given into the use of the Internet in education.
Our current service level will be maintained until 1 August 2010. After this date, Intute will still be available but with minimal maintenance. In addition, we are looking at possibilities to develop Informs and the Virtual Training Suite and offer these as membership services.
We would like to thank those who have used, contributed to and supported Intute over the years.
Our intention is to make a further announcement in early spring with a more detailed description of what we will be able to offer after 1 August 2010.
In the meantime, if you have any pressing questions please send them to us by following our Feedback link, click on Helpdesk , then submit your question selecting “Funding cut” in the “Type of question” box.
Caroline Williams
Executive Director of Intute
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