TREC Enterprise 2008 overview
The overview paper of the TREC 2008 Enterprise track is -finally- available. While I was not an organizer of the track, I helped out with finishing the paper; the track organizers generously awarded my contribution with a first authorship. The document still needs to undergo the NIST approval process, but I am allowed to distribute it as “draft”.
[Dowload PDF|BibTex].
Despite having my name on the overview paper, I am still wearing a participant’s hat. So the first questions that comes to mind is: How did we do? (We is team ISLA, consisting of Maarten de Rijke and me.) To cut the story short — we won! Of course, TREC (according to some people) is not a competition. I am not going to take a side on that matter (at least not in this post), so let me translate the simple “we won” statement from ordinary to scientific language: our run showed the best performance among all submissions for the expert finding task of the TREC 2008 Enterprise track. Actually, we achieved both first and second place for all metrics and for all three different versions of the official qrels (they differ in how assessor agreement was handled). Our best run employed a combination of three models: a proximity-based candidate model, a document-based model, and a Web-based variation of the candidate model; our second best run is the same, but without the Web-based component. See the details in our paper [Download PDF|BibTex].
Needless to say, I am very content with these results. Seeing that my investments into research on expert finding has resulted in the state-of-the-art feels just great.
Awarded with Victorine van Schaickprijs 2009
On the 9th of October 2009, I received the Victorine van Schaickprijs 2009 award for my PhD dissertation entitled “People Search in the Enterprise”. This award is given out yearly by the Victorine van Schaick Funds to one selected publication (journal article, book, or report) in the area of library and information sciences; it comes with a cash prize of €1500 and a bronze medal.
The Board of the Foundation has this year chosen my thesis as the winner because “its impact on the discipline and because it is of interest to a wide circle of colleagues”. Also, “The jury appreciates especially his willingness to undertake research in less explored areas of the field.” (from the Jury report).
I would like to use this opportunity to express my gratitude to my thesis supervisor, Prof. Maarten de Rijke. I would like to thank the selection committee again for this award: I am extremely pleased with this recognition of my work.