PhD thesis

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.

Official report of the Award Ceremony (in Dutch).

500+ thesis downloads

My thesis hit a significant milestone last week as it crossed the 500 download mark. It took less than 8 months since it was made available online in 2008 July to reach this.

The first release of the implementation of the models introduced in the thesis, alias EARS (Entity and Association Retrieval System), is expected to arrive before the end of this month.

Thesis in the news

NWO has also released an English translation of the article about my thesis work that had escaped my attention when I posted the link to the Dutch version. Obviously, a number of news sites did not miss it (I believe this has to be credited to NWO), and picked up this press release. It’s basically the same story, published under various titles —and since one of these is in French, I can say— and in multiple languages. Here is a list with the appearances I found so far. (If you find one that is not on the list, please post it in a comment!)

Dr. Balog

It has been a while since my last post…
I’ll write an update soon, but in the meantime, let me just make brief mention of a certain event that took place recently, and I think worths a post. Yes, I’m referring to my PhD defense on September 30th. So, as of that date, I’m Dr. Balog :)
My homepage still needs to be updated at several points (e.g., replacing all the “PhD student” parts with something else), but this is an activity I’ll do with pleasure.

Here is a press release from NWO (in Dutch) about my thesis work.

Thesis resources #1: CSIRO candidates and associations

As promised before, it’s now time to start sharing some resources that I obtained during my thesis work. This first release contains two CSIRO related items: the list of CSIRO candidates (e-mail addresses) and a list of document-candidate associations.
I was actually keen to make these available before the submission deadline for the Expert Search runs at the TREC 2008 Enterprise track. These lists, of course, are far from perfect, but worked for me quite well. If you have comments, suggestions, improved versions, etc. feel free to contact me!
The files are available at the same place as the CERC collection (so you’ll need the same username and password): http://es.csiro.au/cerc/data/balog. Thanks to Paul Thomas for arranging the hosting!