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.
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Sheila Thomas BA MCLIP MWeldI
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