Tony Kent Strix Award 2022

Iadh Ounis, Professor of Information Retrieval, School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow and Dr. Ryen White, Genral Manager and Partner Research Director, Microsoft Research. The judging panel congratulates them on their prolific and significant contributions to information retrieval research and development on multiple fronts, most notably the search experience. Their high impact publication records and scholarly contributions are peerless and international support for their nominations was overwhelming across the information retrieval community. Professor Ounis is noted for his sustained contributions to advances in information retrieval, his inspirational leadership, commitment to PhD education and research and contributions to R&D through open-source software and information retrieval tools. The highly valued Terrier and PyTerrier platforms have been utilised extensively across the information retrieval community and advanced research significantly. He has focused on designing intelligent technology that enables people to access information, developing new models and techniques for search engines. His work is at the intersection of information retrieval, machine learning and big data systems where data driven models are learned from the users' interactions with the system. His work on many information retrieval tasks including expert search models, search results diversification, search ranking, recommendation, fake news detection and query performance prediction has furthered the community’s understanding of some of the most fundamental information retrieval questions. ‘I'm delighted to receive this prestigious award and honoured to join the company of the inspiring past recipients who have influenced my own career in the field. I'm grateful to those colleagues, predecessors and friends who nominated me and/or supported my award application.’ Dr. White has made important contributions to information retrieval, search interaction models and health informatics, mainly focussed on understanding and enriching user interactions with information retrieval systems. He leads multidisciplinary research teams that have developed new techniques and advanced the state of the art in projects spanning artificial intelligence, human-computer Interaction and systems development. His user- and task-centric collaboration with Microsoft colleagues has pushed the boundaries in web and enterprise search. His research has underpinned the development and enhancement of widely available Microsoft products and services including the Cortana digital assistant, Bing, Xbox, Internet Explorer, Skype, Windows, Office and Azure. He was also the chief scientist at Microsoft Health. ‘I am deeply humbled to receive the 2022 Strix Award and join such an illustrious group of fellow awardees. Information retrieval has been a passion of mine for over two decades. Receiving this recognition from the research community is such an incredible honour.’ The Strix judging panel would like to thank colleagues who submitted a nomination for the 2022 award and look forward to submissions in 2023. The excellence, quantity and quality of the entries is proof positive that the information retrieval community is thriving. UKeiG is a Special Interest Group of CILIP: the library and information association: https://www.cilip.org.uk/

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