UKeiG names Professor Alan Smeaton as the 2011 Tony Kent Strix Award winner

UKeiG is delighted to announce this year’s winner of the UKeiG Tony Kent Strix Award.

Professor Alan Smeaton of the School of Computing, Dublin City University is a worthy winner of this prestigious award with sustained contributions in the field of natural language processing techniques for textual information retrieval as well as in the indexing and retrieval of image, audio and video data. He now leads a research team at the University of 40 researchers working in areas including life-logging, video analysis, summarization and search, data aggregation in environmental sensor networks, collaborative search techniques, data fusion from sensor networks and using sensors in media applications. He was founding director for the Centre for Digital Video Processing, a world-leading research centre for video processing and retrieval. Professor Smeaton was also the founding coordinator of TRECVid, which started as an independent evaluation exercise of the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) in 2001 – an initiative that has clearly been instrumental to the progress of the field of digital video retrieval.

The presentation of the ‘Owl’ Trophy and a certificate will take place on Monday 24^th October at the Enterprise Search Europe event at the Hilton London Olympia. Martin White (UKeiG Chair), Doug Veal (Chair of the Strix Award Panel) and David Hawking, the Keynote Speaker for the opening day, will preside over the presentation. They will be joined by representatives of the UKeiG Tony Kent Strix Award’s two sponsors: ASLIB and the Chemical Information and Computer Applications Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Further information about the award, as well as a list of past winners, can be found at http://www.ukeig.org.uk/awards/tony-kent-strix.