UKeiG presented certificates to this year's winners of the UKeiG Tony
Kent Strix Award and the UKeiG Jason Farradane Award during the second
day of Internet Librarian International 2012. In 2012 for the first time
in the Award's history, the judging panel was unable to identify a clear
winner, and presented the UKeiG Tony Kent Strix Award 2012 jointly to
Doug Cutting (received by his nominator, Martin White) and Professor
David Hawking (received by Stephen Robertson). The 2012 recipient of the
UKeiG Jason Farradane Award was Peter Willet, representing the
Chemoinformatics Research Group in the Information School, University of
Sheffield.
Doug Cutting has been working in the field of information retrieval for
over fifteen years, beginning with five years at Xerox's Palo Alto
Research Center (PARC) developing novel approaches to information
access. Since then he has gone on to work for Apple's Advanced
Technology Group and Excite, before developing the Lucene search engine
and the open-source Hadoop framework. In July 2009, Doug Cutting was
elected to the board of directors of the Apache Software Foundation, and
in September 2010, he was elected its chairman; in 2011 he joined
Cloudera to continue to develop the Hadoop software. The impact of
Cutting's work, both in developing Lucene and Hadoop, and his work at
Apple, Excite and Yahoo on search development, is unparalleled in the
history of search software development, and the judges had no doubt that
he is a worthy recipient of the Award.
Dave Hawking has successfully mixed involvement in the commercial world
of search engines with academic activities. For seven years he
coordinated the VLC (very large collection) and Web tracks at TREC,
during which time the TREC idea of laboratory experiments was
successfully scaled up to near web scale. As a researcher, he has
focused on enterprise and web search, on evaluation of search engines in
realistic contexts, on the use of a variety of sources of information by
search engines (for example anchor text or context), and on search
efficiency. Over his career he has helped to develop a real sense of the
ways in which different contexts offer both difficulties and
opportunities to the designers of search engines. His enterprise search
engine company Funnelback has developed an enviable client list. As with
his co-winner, the judges had no hesitation in making the Award.
The Chemoinformatics Research Group has been one of the leading centres
worldwide for chemoinformatics research for over forty years, and has
been noted as providing "the most widely recognized and well-established
research and teaching base in the field." The Group has demonstrated
over many years the contributions that can be made by those with a
specifically information perspective that complements more obviously
chemical and biological studies. The Group's work was initiated by
Michael Lynch, who arrived at Sheffield in 1965 from the post of Head of
Basic Research at Chemical Abstracts Service.
The UKeiG Tony Kent Strix Award is sponsored by ASLIB: The Association
for Information Management, and the Royal Society of Chemistry Chemical
Information & Computer Applications Group
Further information and photographs of the presentations can be found at
http://www.ukeig.org.uk/awards.
|