Final Reminder: The First Tony Kent Strix Annual Lecture - London, 6th November

Dear SKOS community Colleagues,
Here's a great opportunity if you're in range of London - and the event 
is free of charge to all - an outstanding presentation by Dr Susan T 
Dumais of Microsoft Research, on Friday November 6th at the Geological 
Society in London, titled:
*Understanding and Improving Search using Large-Scale Behavioural Data*

This will be the first time we hold a Lecture in connection with the 
prestigious Tony Kent Strix Award for information retrieval, and we hope 
to repeat the event annually, with the previous year's Winner giving the 
lecture. Dr Dumais's talk will be followed by a discussion and some time 
for refreshments and networking.

Dr Dumais is Distinguished Scientist and Deputy Managing Director as 
well as Manager of the Context, Learning, and User Experience for Search 
(CLUES) Group at Microsoft Research in the United States. For over 30 
years, she has been a well-respected leading light in information 
retrieval - both in terms of research and practice - with sustained 
contributions that are both innovative and practical. Perhaps her most 
significant contribution is the co-invention of Latent Semantic Analysis 
and Indexing (LSI); a key feature of which is its ability to extract a 
latent conceptual structure from a large collection of texts by 
analysing the associations between terms that occur in similar contexts, 
thus enabling a search engine to retrieve using concepts rather than 
isolated keywords.

This year there will also be a talk and a demonstration of one of Tony 
Kent’s information retrieval packages by Jan Wyllie: *Remembering 
Futures Past, Tony Kent and the Lost Vision of  a Boolean Universe *

Bookings should  be made at: 
http://www.cilip.org.uk/uk-einformation-group/events/tony-kent-strix-annual-lecture.

The Tony Kent Strix Award is presented in memory of Dr Tony Kent, a past 
Fellow of the Institute of Information Scientists, who died in 1997. 
Tony Kent made a major contribution to the development of information 
science and information services both in the UK and internationally, 
particularly in the field of chemistry and, as honoured in this Award, 
an outstanding contribution to the design of retrieval software. The 
Award is given in recognition of an outstanding contribution to the 
field of information retrieval in its widest sense. Each year a call for 
nominations is published in the early summer and the presentation of the 
award is made at Internet Librarian International/Enterprise Search Europe.

The Tony Kent Strix Award is managed by UKeiG (a Special Interest Group 
of CILIP the Chartered Institute of Library and Information 
Professionals) in partnership with the Chemical Information and Computer 
Applications Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC CICAG); the 
International Society for Knowledge Organisation UK Chapter (ISKO UK) 
and the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group 
(BCS IRSG).

The Annual Lecture series is sponsored by Google.

I do hope you can attend.
Stella Dextre Clarke

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Stella Dextre Clarke
Vice-Chair, ISKO UK and Vice-President, ISKO
Luke House, West Hendred, Wantage, OX12 8RR, UK
Tel: 01235-833-298
Fax: 01235-863-298
stella@lukehouse.org
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