Stephen Robertson

Brief CV

• 2008 to date: Visiting Professor, University College London
• 2003 to date: Fellow of Girton College Cambridge
• 1998 to date: Researcher/Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research Cambridge

Education

• 1976: PhD Library and Information Studies University College London
• 1968: MSc Information Science City University
• 1967: BA Mathematics Trinity College Cambridge (first class) (MA 1971)

Awards and honours

• 2003: Fellow of Girton College Cambridge
• 2000: Gerard Salton Award, ACM SIGIR
• 1998: Tony Kent Strix Award, Institute of Information Scientists
• 1981: Fulbright Award
• 1979: Fellow of Institute of Information Scientists (now Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals)
• 1973: Royal Society Research Fellowship

Professional memberships and external activities

FCLIP, MBCS

Member of various journal editorial boards and conference programme committees. External examiner for PhD candidates at various universities in the UK, USA and Europe. Have also served as external examiner for taught masters courses. Member of the RAE panel for Library and Information Management, 1996 and 2001.

S.R. Ranganathan Memorial Lectures, Documentation Research and Training Centre, Bangalore, 1987. ISI Lazerow Lectures, Department of Information Studies, UCLA, 1993. Chair of the John Campbell Trust (affiliated with the Institute of Information Scientists / CILIP), 1999-2007. Lecturer at the European Summer School in Information Retrieval (ESSIR) in 2000 and 2003. Salton Award speaker, SIGIR 2000, Athens. Keynote speaker, International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR), London, 2005. Invited speaker, International Workshop on Research in Digital Libraries, Kolkata, 2006. Keynote speaker, European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), Rome, 2007. Keynote speaker, Information Interaction in Context (IIiX), London, 2008.

Research

Research contributions include:

• A series of contributions to the probabilistic modelling of information retrieval and the design of retrieval systems, specifically ranking algorithms (my BM25 algorithm of 1994 is currently state-of-the-art);
• Extensive evaluation experiments in information retrieval, including participation in the annual TREC competition, and contributions to evaluation methodology;
• Creation of a world-class research centre at City University (two successive best-possible RAE results during my tenure of the department headship);
• Leadership of a group at Microsoft Research Cambridge.

Publications list available at http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~ser/pubs.html

Kalervo Järvelin

 Brief CV