UKeiG (U.K. eInformation Group) announced that Professor W Bruce Croft is the 2013 winner of the Tony Kent Strix Award which was presented at the Internet Librarian International (ILI 2013) in London on October 16.
The Tony Kent Strix Award is presented by UKeiG, in partnership with the Chemical Information and Computer Applications Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC CICAG); the International Society for Knowledge Organisation UK Chapter (ISKO UK) and the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG).
The Strix Award is presented in memory of Dr Tony Kent, a past Fellow of the Institute of Information Scientists, who died in 1997. This lifetime achievement award is given in recognition of an outstanding contribution to the field of information retrieval that meets one of the following criteria: a major and/or sustained contribution to the theoretical or experimental understanding of the information retrieval process; development of, or significant improvement in, mechanisms, a product or service for the retrieval of information, either generally or in a specialised field; development of, or significant improvement in, ease of access to an information service; development and/or exploitation of new technologies to enhance information retrieval; a sustained contribution over a period of years to the field of information retrieval; for example, by running an information service or by contributing at national or international level to organisations active in the field.
According to UKeiG, "Bruce Croft has made major contributions to most areas of information retrieval, including pioneering work in clustering, passage retrieval, sentence retrieval, and distributed search. ... As a consequence of his work, Croft is one of the most cited researchers in information retrieval."
Croft formed the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) in 1991. He and his students have worked with more than 90 industry and government partners on research and technology projects and have produced more than 900 papers. Croft was a member of the National Research Council Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, 2000-2003, and Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 1995-2002. He was elected a Fellow of ACM in 1997, and received the Research Award from the American Society for Information Science and Technology in 2000. He has also received the Gerard Salton Award from the ACM Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval (SIGIR).
Doug Veal (Chair of the Strix Award Panel and representing award sponsors, RCS-CICAG) made the presentation to Stephen Robertson who received the trophy on behalf of Croft.
Details can be found at http://www.ukeig.org.uk/awards/tony-kent-strix.