Emine Yilmaz awarded the Microsoft BCS Karen Sparck-Jones Award

The British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG) in conjunction with the BCS created the award in 2008 to commemorate the achievements of Karen Spärck Jones. Karen Spärck Jones was a Professor Emerita of Computers and Information at the University of Cambridge and one of the most remarkable women in computer science. She also works as a research consultant for Microsoft Research Cambridge.

Emine Yilmaz is a senior lecturer in the CS department and a member of the department's Media Futures group. She also works as a research consultant for Microsoft Research Cambridge.

The citation from the BCS IRSG states "The panel was impressed by the body of Emine's research on evaluation techniques to better match the realities of modern information systems, in particular her work on missing user judgments, her proposed new metrics that are more robust to missing data and her work on expected browsing utility as a new evaluation metric derived from interaction patterns of real web search sessions. Her recent work focused on devising and evaluating the quality of task based information retrieval systems, retrieval systems that can help the user complete the task that have led them issue a query to a search engine, as opposed to just retrieving a list of documents relevant to the query submitted. The panel recognized that Emine's research has pushed the field of IR forward in these important aspects and that her work has had a high impact on academia and practice."