Tony Kent Strix Award 2024

Nicola Ferro, one of the world’s leading scientists in information retrieval, is Professor in Computer Science at the Department of Information Engineering of University of Padua. Nicola’s IR research focuses on evaluation, from both a theoretical and an experimental perspective. He chairs the Steering Committee of CLEF (Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum), the internationally renowned European initiative for the evaluation of multilingual and multimodal information access systems, and through his efforts has made it central to the IR evaluation community. He was inducted into the Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval (SIGIR) Academy in 2023 in recognition of his significant research, innovation and service delivery. The Strix judging panel noted that his contributions to IR are extensive, evidenced by an outstanding and impactful publications record. It would like to congratulate him on his prolific and significant leadership and contribution to the profession on multiple fronts. Nicola was delighted to receive the news: ‘I’m honoured to receive this prestigious award and thank the Strix judging panel for such important recognition. This achievement would have not been possible without the mentors I've encountered throughout my career and without the collaboration with and inspiration from numerous colleagues, in Padua and around the world. I consider this award an appreciation of not only my work but also of the contributions of the international CLEF community.’ Professor Norbert Fuhr, Information Engineering, Department of Computer Science and Applied Cognitive Science at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, submitted the nomination. It included five letters of support from well-known scientists, one of whom was 2017 Strix award winner Professor Maarten de Rijke, University of Amsterdam Informatics. ‘Early in his career, Nicola Ferro made ground-breaking contributions on reference models for digital libraries, on annotations of digital content, and on system design for digital libraries. His work in this area has been very influential. He is best known for his impressive contributions to the evaluation of information retrieval systems. He is among the world’s top experts in the field. Thanks to Nicola’s tireless work, his people skills, and his scientific vision, CLEF unites a broad set of tasks, from traditional document retrieval to environmental image classification to medical data integration. CLEF has been, and continues to be, instrumental in supporting and advancing the research agendas of countless researchers.’ The Strix award judging panel would like to thank all colleagues who submitted nominations, and we look forward to your submissions in 2025. The excellence and quality of the entries is proof positive that the information retrieval community is not just thriving, but expanding. UKeiG is a Special Interest Group of CILIP: the library and information association: https://www.cilip.org.uk/

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