On Wednesday last week I had the honour of co-chairing the 16th Search Solutions conference, hosted online. As before, the event included presentations, panels and keynote talks by influential industry leaders on novel and emerging applications in search and information retrieval. And in keeping with previous events, we were delighted to be able to announce the winners of this year’s BCS Search Industry Awards. In a special session held at the close of Search Solution 2021, it was my honour to announce the winners for the following categories:
- Best search user experience goes to Lexis Nexis for their work on Open question answering on Lexis+, the first open format question answering system for the legal domain.
- Most promising startup goes to Resolute.AI, a New York based startup that has created a AI driven platform to search major FDA databases in the public domain in a federated way.
- Best open source project goes to CiteSeerX, one of the largest open source academic search engines with over 10 million documents. All code and documents are open access under a CC license.
- Search Professional of 2021 is Dr Stuart Mackie, Lead Data Scientist at BiP Solutions. Dr Mackie was the KTP Associate on a KTP project with BiP Solutions Ltd – he was tasked with improving BIP Solution’s search solutions for procurement searchers and increase their relevance through machine learning.
- Best presentation at Search Solutions (as voted for by the audience) goes to Olivia Foulds, Department of Computer Science, University of Strathclyde. Olivia gave us an intriguing insight to her work on the effects of visual distraction and clutter on information seeking behaviour.
Congratulations to all five winners!
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank our judging panel:
They did a remarkably thorough job of evaluating a highly competitive field with many strong submissions. I hope that winners share my view that this makes their awards all the more special.
Next year we hope to offer a similar set of awards but we are also open to suggestions for new ideas and categories. If you’d like to contribute, just drop us a line.
Nominations for next year’s awards will open early in 2022. As with this year’s awards, we are happy to accept self-nominations or nominations from a 3rd party. Good luck!
Information Interaction 
[…] For a list of the 2021 Award winners go here. […]