I was honoured to receive a Best Paper Award for my paper “Conversational AI from an Information Retrieval Perspective: Remaining Challenges and a Case for User Simulation” at the 2nd International Conference on Design of Experimental Search & Information REtrieval Systems (DESIRES’21), which took place last week. The paper as well as the presentation slides are available online.
Awards, grants
Highlights from 2018
This was another year when I was just too busy to blog. But, here are a few things from 2018 to be proud of (in no particular order).
- PhD students: Faegheh Hasibi defended her PhD thesis and Trond Linjordet joined my group.
- Our SIGIR’06 paper with Leif Azzopardi and Maarten de Rijke received a Test of Time Honorable Mention Award at SIGIR’18.
- I joined Google for my sabbatical to work on explainable AI in the context of conversational recommender systems.
- I am general co-chair for ICTIR 2020, which will be held in Stavanger, Norway.
- My book on Entity-Oriented Search got published by Springer and is available open access.
- I was recipient of the Karen Spärck Jones Award 2018 for my contributions to the area of semantic search and for my work on evaluation methodology.
4M NOK funding from ToppForsk-UiS
I received 4M NOK external funding (~440K EUR) from the ToppForsk programme to work on the FAETE project (From Answering Engines to Task-completion Engines). ToppForsk is a research programme for outstanding young researchers, put in place by the University of Stavanger in cooperation with Universitetsfondet. The official announcement with more details about the programme and its 2015 winners can be found here (in Norwegian). The project, with a total project budget of 9.7M NOK (over 1M EUR), will allow me to spend 60% of my time on research for the following 4 years and will fund 2 PhD students (announcements will follow in due time).
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.