The International Society for Knowledge Organisation (ISKO) UK, in association with iUKeiG and the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group, honored Susan Dumais with this year’s Tony Kent Strix Award.

Dumais is an iSchool affiliate faculty, and distinguished scientist and deputy managing director of the Context, Learning, and User Experience for Search (CLUES) Group for Microsoft Research. The award is given in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the field of information retrieval.

“It is truly an honor to receive the Tony Kent Strix award, not just for me, but also for the many colleagues who I have collaborated with from Bell Labs, Bellcore, Microsoft Research, and the iSchool," says Dumais. “The citation highlights my research at the intersection of information retrieval and human-computer interaction, and I find it especially gratifying to see the importance of this kind of interdisciplinary perspective recognized.”

Dumais' research interests include algorithms and interfaces for improved information retrieval, as well as general issues in human-computer interaction. Her current research focuses on gaze-enhanced interaction, the temporal dynamics of information systems, user modeling and personalization, novel interfaces for interactive retrieval and search evaluation.

The ISKO announcement highlights Dumais’ 30-year contributions to the field, including the development of novel algorithms to help people to find, use, and make sense of information and her research, at the intersection of human computer interaction and information retrieval, has broad applications for both understanding and improving searching and browsing from the Internet to the desktop.

Stella Dextre Clarke, ISKO UK Information Consultant and Chair, noted  Dumais’ significant contribution as the co-inventor of Latent Semantic Analysis and Indexing (LSI); a key feature of which is its ability to extract the latent conceptual structure from a large collection of texts by analyzing the associations between terms that occur in similar contexts, thus enabling a search engine to retrieve using concepts rather than keywords.

The Tony Kent Strix Award is presented in memory of Tony Kent, a past Fellow of the Institute of Information Scientists, who died in 1997. 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.