Tony Kent Strix Award 2025

The UK electronic information Group (UKeiG) is pleased to announce that the worthy recipient of the international Tony Kent Strix Memorial Award for 2025 is Professor Noriko Kando of the National Institute of Informatics (NII) in Japan for her pioneering role in information retrieval (IR) research, development and systems evaluation. The award celebrates her distinguished research record, dedication, impact and excellent scientific contributions to the discipline. Professor Kando is the founder and driving force of NTCIR, the text retrieval development and evaluation initiative and service in Asia. NTCIR is recognised worldwide for its transformational and far-reaching contributions to advancing interactive IR, educating IR researchers and developing IR science in many areas including multilingual and multimodal information access, natural language processing and IR systems evaluation. Her pioneering leadership has played a fundamental role in building an international IR infrastructure, nurturing the emergence of a vibrant and growing research community across East Asia and beyond. The Strix award honours outstanding contributions to the field in memory of Tony Kent, a remarkable IR pioneer. It was inaugurated in 1998 by the Institute of Information Scientists and is now presented by UKeiG in partnership with the International Society for Knowledge Organisation UK (ISKO UK), the Royal Society of Chemistry Chemical Information and Computer Applications Group (RSC CICAG) and the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG). Whereas at the time of Kent’s ground-breaking achievements IR was a fascinating sideline for relatively few specialists, nowadays the ‘search function’ underpins everyday living at home, at work and across the globe. This Strix Award is more widely relevant than ever before. Professor Kando was delighted to receive the news and will celebrate her award in a special free Zoom lecture at 10 am London time on Friday 30 January 2026. The lecture can be booked online. “I’m honoured to receive this prestigious international award and thank the Strix judging panel for its generous recognition. This achievement would have not been possible without the mentors, collaborators and support I’ve encountered throughout my career.” Makoto P. Kato, Associate Professor at both the University of Tsukuba and the National Institute of Informatics submitted the nomination. “Professor Kando’s establishment of the NTCIR created a vital research hub in East Asia. Her strategic vision has driven advancements across diverse information access technologies, including patent and math retrieval, sentiment analysis, lifelog search, and multimodal summarisation. As a researcher whose career was nurtured by the NTCIR community, I am delighted to see her exceptional achievements recognised with the Tony Kent Strix Award.” The nomination included letters of support from distinguished information scientists Dr Ellen M. Voorhees (National Institute of Standards and Technology), Prof. Maarten de Rijke (University of Amsterdam), Prof. Iadh Ounis (University of Glasgow) and Prof. Nicola Ferro (University of Padua). Co-signatories of the nomination were: • Prof. Douglas W. Oard, University of Maryland • Prof. Mark Sanderson, RMIT University • Prof. Charles L. A. Clarke, University of Waterloo • Prof. Tetsuya Sakai, Waseda University • Prof. Yiqun Liu, Tsinghua University • Prof. Hideo Joho, University of Tsukuba • Prof. Zhicheng Dou, Renmin University of China • Assoc. Prof. Takehiro Yamamoto, University of Hyogo The Strix award judging panel would like to thank all colleagues who submitted nominations, and we look forward to your submissions in 2026. 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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