Dr Ivan Vulić from the University of Cambridge has been named as the winner of the Microsoft-BCS/BCS-IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award 2021
The award, which is sponsored by Microsoft Research, was created in 2008 to remember Professor Karen Spärck Jones FBA, a leading researcher in information retrieval at what was at the time called the Cambridge “Mathematical Laboratory”. In a landmark 1972 paper, she discovered the utility of inverse document (collection) frequency (IDF), an important factor now standard in ranked document retrieval as used by most search systems.
Prof. Jochen Leidner, the current chair of the award, said that for the first time this year, the judges.= have included experts from the field of Natural Language Processing as well as Information Retrieval, to broaden the scope of the award and build bridges between the two communities, both of which Karen Spärck Jones mingled in and contributed to. “We are grateful to the Executive of the European Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) for contributing to the pool of judges,” he said, “and I call upon all research group leaders to consider nominating the best and brightest from among their former Ph.D. students for this award; we have so much talent in our community, let us celebrate them.”
The award recognizes brilliant, impactful scientists within the first ten years of obtaining their doctoral degrees. The awardee will be invited to give a recipient lecture at ECIR 2022 in Stavanger, Norway.
* The Award Homepage at the BCS IRSG
* The announcement at the University of Cambridge:
https://www.mmll.cam.ac.uk/news/dr-ivan-vulic-wins-microsoft-bcsbcs-irsg-karen-sparck-jones-award
* Dr Ivan Vulić’s homepage:
https://sites.google.com/site/ivanvulic/