Search experience winners
A MICROSOFT Research Director and a University of Glasgow profes- sor have been recognised for their outstanding achievements in the field of information retrieval. The joint winners of the 2022 Tony Kent
Strix Memorial Award were Iadh Ounis, Professor of Information Retrieval, School of Computing Science, University of Glas- gow, and Dr Ryen White, General Manager and Partner Research Director at Micro- soft Research. The judging panel said that the two win-
ners had made prolific and significant contributions to information
retrieval
research and development on multiple fronts, most notably the search experience. In its announcement, the UK electronic information Group (UKeiG), listed Profes- sor Ounis’s contributions to advances in information retrieval, including his lead- ership, commitment to PhD education and research and contributions to R&D through open-source software and infor- mation retrieval tools. The announcement said: “The highly val- ued Terrier and PyTerrier platforms have been utilised extensively across the infor- mation retrieval community and advanced
research significantly. He has focused on designing intelligent t echnology that enables people to access information, developing new models and techniques for search engines.”
It said that his work sits “at the inter- section of information retrieval, machine learning and big data systems where data driven models are learned from the us- ers’ interactions with the system. His work on many information retrieval tasks including expert search models, search results div ersi fication, search ranking, recommendation, fake news detection and query performance prediction has furthered the community’s understand ing of some of the most fundamental informa- tion retrieval questions.” The UKeiG announcement said that Dr White’s recognition was for “important contributions to information retrieval, search interaction models and health informatics, mainly focussed on under- standing and enriching user interactions with information retrieval systems”. It adds that he leads multidisciplinary research teams that have developed new techniques and advanced the state of the art in projects spanning artificial intelli-
Digital lending highlights
GLOBAL e-lending rose by 10 per cent over the last year, according to figures from Overdrive.
The digital lending platform, which serves more than
88,000 libraries and schools in 109 countries, revealed that in 2022 there were more than 555 million ebooks, audiobooks, digital magazines and comics loaned out by libraries. It puts the growth down to “innovations that high-performing public libraries, schools and other institu- tions used to serve their readers,” adding that readers “have checked out a total of three billion digital books from public libraries, schools and academic libraries in the OverDrive network since the first ebook checkout in 2003”. It said Libby app checkouts grew 30 per cent, and millions more readers have installed the app, up 42 per cent. With ebook lending growing by four per cent to 331 mil-
lion, the overall double digit growth rates were boosted by audiobooks, up 17 per cent to 191 million, and magazine borrowing up 38 per cent to 32 million. Meanwhile comic and graphic novel lending was up 18 per cent to 33 million. OverDrive said the number of Public library systems achieving more than one million digital book checkouts was 129 in seven countries, an increase of seven per cent. This includes one system with over 10 million digital book check- outs and 61 systems with over two million checkouts. Another area of growth was schools with OverDrive say-
ing its Sora app checkouts grew 10 per cent, and a record number of school systems (four) borrowed one million dig- ital books through the Sora app. Other items of interest in- cluded a 13 per cent increase in ebook and audiobook holds/ wait listed items to 214 million, and that more than 14,000 libraries held their own local digital book club in 2022.
January-February 2023 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 11
gence, human-computer Interaction and systems development. Dr White’s research has underpinned the development and enhancement of widely available Microsoft products and ser vices including the Cortana digital assis- tant, Bing, Xbox, Internet Explorer, Skype, Windows, Office and Azure. He was also the chief scientist at Microsoft Health. Dr White said: “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.” And Professor Ounis said: “I’m delighted to receive this prestigious award and hon- oured 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.” Two online Strix Memorial Lectures
will be presented by Professor Ounis and Dr White on the afternoon of Thursday 23 February 2023. Further details and booking information will be announced.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56
