An Award to Commemorate Karen Spärck Jones

The British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG) in conjunction with the BCS has created an award to commemorate the achievements of Karen Spärck Jones. In order to honour Karen's achievements, the BCS/BCS-IRSG has established an annual award to encourage and promote talented researchers who have endeavoured to advance our understanding of Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing with significant experimental contributions.

The IRSG is grateful to Microsoft Research for their sponsorship of the Karen Sparck Jones award

Timeline for 2013

• 7 April, 2013 - Call for nominations.
• 15 September, 2013 - Deadline for nominations.
• 1 October, 2013 - Deadline for support letters.
• 15 December, 2013 - Notification of the prize winner.
• 13-17 April, 2014 - Winner presents keynote at ECIR.

The details about the award can be found in the flyer pdf doc.

The Winner of 2012

We are happy to inform you that the BCS/ BCS IRSG Karen Spärck-Jones Award Panel has decided to make the Award for 2012 to:

Diane Kelly
Associate Professor, University of North Carolina, NC, U.S.

In making the BCS/ BCS IRSG Karen Spärck-Jones Award for 2012, the Panel strongly recognizes that Diane has made important contributions to: the analysis of information seeking behaviors, and to the development of new experimental methods and systems to support information seeking and analysis.

Diane has made several other important contributions to user modeling using implicit indicators of relevance, the development and analysis of interfaces to elicit richer statements of interest, and new methodologies for designing and evaluating interactive retrieval systems. Her strong user-oriented work views users-as-people with cognitive tasks.

Diane has given a keynote speech at ECIR 2013. The slides of her talk are available for download

The winner of 2011

An Award was not made this year.

The winner of 2010

On behalf of the KSJ Award Panel, it is with great pleasure to announce this years (for the nominations of 2010) winner:

Evgeniy Gabrilovich
Senior Research Scientist and Manager of the NLP & IR Group of Yahoo! Research, California, U.S.

Evgeniy was extremely delighted to be awarded the BCS / BCS IRSG KSJ Award 2010. He has given a keynote speech at ECIR 2011. The abstract of his talk and his bio is available.

The winner of 2009

The first recipient of the KSJ Award winner for 2009 is

Mirella Lapata.
Mirella is at the University of Edinburgh. She is a Reader (Assoc Prof) within the School of Informatics. Her research has focused on various problems in NLP mostly with an emphasis on statistical methods and text generation applications. She has worked on complex problems like: word sense disambiguation, ambiguity resolution, semantic vector space, story generation, and many others.

The abstract of her talk at ECIR 2009 and her bio is available for download.