On Wednesday last week I had the honour of co-chairing the 11th Search Solutions conference at BCS London in Covent Garden. As always, the event included presentations, panels and keynote talks by influential industry leaders on novel and emerging applications in search and information retrieval. But this year’s event was memorable for a different reason: we were delighted to be able to reveal the outcome of the inaugural IRSG Search Industry Awards. In a ceremony held at the close of Search Solution 2016, it was my honour to announce the winners for the following three categories:
- Best presentation at Search Solutions goes to Frederic Fol Leymarie of DynAikon Ltd, for a talk titled “Human Visual Perception + Computer Vision to provide greater User Control for Shape-based Search”. Frederic gave us an intriguing insight to his work on the application of perception/psychophysics and computer vision to the problem of indexing and retrieval of objects in static and dynamic video scenes.
- Most promising start-up of 2016 goes to ContextFlow, for their work on developing and commercialising the radiology image search technology developed in the EU FP7 Khresmoi project as the product Radiology Explorer. The certificate was presented to Markus Krenn, Quality Manager at ContextFlow.
- Best Search Project of 2016 goes to Rich Miller, Todd Frascone and Serena Wellen of Lexis Nexis for their work on Search Term Maps. This project is the culmination of years of research into how legal professionals glean information from documents within query results. It displays query-term hit-patterns from the most relevant parts of each document allowing users to quickly scan results lists and documents for relevant results and home in on the best case for their issue.
Congratulations to all three winners!
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank our judging panel who did a remarkably thorough job of evaluating the submissions. I am assured that the field was highly competitive with many strong submissions. I hope that winners share my view that this makes their award all the more special.
Next year we hope to offer the same three awards but we are also considering a new (and in my opinion wholly appropriate) category: the outstanding individual award. This could apply all the unsung heroes in our own organisations who go above & beyond the call of duty to make search work, or to those individuals who over the years have made a sustained and visible contribution to the search and information retrieval community. I can already think of several deserving individuals, and I am sure you can too.
Nominations will open in 2017. As with this year’s awards, we are happy to accept self-nominations or nominations of a 3rd party. I encourage you to apply!
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