Call for Nominations: The Microsoft BCS/BCS IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award 2022
TLDR: Closing date: 9 September 2022
~ An award to commemorate Karen Spärck Jones ~
A pioneer of information retrieval, the computer science sub-discipline that also underpins the technology of modern Web search engines, Karen Spärck Jones was a British professor of Computers and Information at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge. Her contributions to the fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR), especially with regard to experimentation, have been outstanding, highly influential and lasting, and include the introduction of Inverse Document Frequency for relevance ranking. Her achievements resulted in her receiving a number of prestigious accolades such as the BCS Lovelace medal for her advancement in Information Systems, and the ACM Salton Award for her significant, sustained and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval. Karen was also an outspoken advocate for women in computing, and we encourage former advisors of talented scientists to provide the judges with a rich and diverse candidate pool to select from.
To learn more about Karen and her work, visit: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Sp%C3%A4rck_Jones * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8FecRxSiUM * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fYeKiebpuo
In order to honour Karen's achievements, the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG) in conjunction with the BCS has established an annual award to encourage and promote talented researchers who have endeavoured to advance our understanding of Natural Language Processing or Information Retrieval with significant experimental contributions.
To celebrate the commemorative event, the recipient of the 2021 award will be invited to present a keynote lecture at BCS IRSG’s annual conference — the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) next year. This forum provides an excellent venue to present and announce the award as the conference attracts many new and young researchers.
Eligibility. Open to all NLP/IR researchers who have no more than 10 years experience after their Ph.D. at the closing date for nominations (non-research times, e.g. parental leave or career breaks, will be taken into account to ensure equity; please point at such times in the nominee's CVs).
Criteron. The candidate ought to have substantially advanced our understanding of NLP or IR or both through experimentation.
Nominations. The following should be provided: • Name of nominee, position, affiliation, years since completion of the Ph.D.; • Name of person proposing the nominee, position, and affiliation; • Short case for the award, not to exceed 2,500 words, highlighting the contributions the individual has made; • List of the individual's top five publications reflecting the relevant contributions, and role within these; and • Exactly two supporting letters from people who would like to encourage/support the nomination.
Nominations should be emailed to the panel chair below. The support letters can be emailed separately by the referees. It is possible for individuals to nominate themselves, in which case they should provide three support letters. Please note that we anticipate that people who provide support letters will do so only for a single candidate.
Award Panel. The Award Panel Chair, appointed by the BCS IRSG Committee, will invite panel members from amongst representatives of the BCS main council, the BCS IRSG Committee, the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), the Award-sponsoring organisation (unless there could be a conflict of interest), as well as seasoned experts in IR and NLP from academia and industry.
Prize. The recipient of the award will receive a certificate, a trophy, a cash prize of £1000 plus expenses for the awardee to travel to ECIR 2023.
Note that the Karen Spärck Jones Award will now alternate between ECIR and EACL to promote integration between the IR and NLP communities that Karen Spärck Jones was an active member of. The 2022 prize award lecture will take place at ECIR 2023.
Timeline for the 2022 Award: • 9 September 2022 — closing date for nominations; • 17 September 2022 — deadline for support letters; • 9 December 2022 — notification of the prize recipient; • 2 April-6 April 2023 — recipient presents keynote at ECIR 2023 in Dublin, Ireland.
The Karen Spärck Jones Award is sponsored by Microsoft Research Cambridge; we would like to thank our generous sponsors.
Current Award Chair: Professor Jochen L. Leidner <leidner AT acm.org>.
Dear all,
We are looking for motivated candidates to work on biomedical text mining and NLP at my group, mainly on topics related to biomedical NLP (biomaterials) in the context of two large Horizon Europe international projects which enable direct collaboration with clinical sites, research groups as well as technological partners.
*Reference:* 273_22_LS_TM_RE2
*Job title:* Research Engineer - Text Mining (RE2)
*Applications procedure and process**:* https://www.bsc.es/join-us/job-opportunities/27322lstmre2
*Context And Mission*
The Text Mining Unit (PI Martin Krallinger) has several research lines related to biomedical and clinical NLP and Text Mining activities with particular interest in implementing advanced deep learning/transformer based approaches as well as building and exploiting domain specific language models.
Through collaboration with research groups, hospitals as well as project partners (Horizon Projects) our aim is to develop real world applications related to semantic annotation (NER) components, entity linking, semantic text similarity, building and exploiting text-derived knowledge graph as well as domain specific machine translation technologies.
We search for a Research Engineer in text mining / Natural Language Processing (NLP), medical informatics, computational linguistics or language engineering with a strong background in Machine Learning (ML), who will be responsible for the implementation of text mining tools for the Horizon BIOMATDB (https://biomatdb.eu) project.
*Key Duties*
- Design, implementation, and evaluation of text mining, NLP, deep learning and ML tools and models applied to the biomaterials, chemistry, biology and biomedical application domain. - Coordination and organization of shared tasks and evaluation campaigns (like BioASQ, IberLEF,..). - Technical coordination and supervision of annotation projects to generate high-quality text corpora. - Integration of results and components into a biomaterials knowledgebase.
*Requirements*
Education
- University degree in computer science, mathematics, statistics, Chemical engineering, materials engineering, data scientist, physics, bioinformatics, telecommunications, electrical engineering or equivalent.
Essential Knowledge and Professional Experience
- Experience with Deep Learning and statistical data mining frameworks: Keras, Tensorflow, PySpark, PyTorch, Spacy, etc. - Experience with ML algorithms and techniques: LDA, Topic Modelling, LSTM, KNN, SVM, Decision Trees, Clustering, Word Embeddings, etc. - Experience in the development or management of software resources/tools, Github + Github projects. - Experience with NLP components and platforms. - Experience with named entity recognition and entity linking methodologies.
Additional Knowledge and Professional Experience
- Strong programming skills in at least one of the following languages: Python, C++, Scala, R, Java. - Experience and skills related to bash, Docker, Kubernetes, Unity testing, Collab
Competences
- Interest in biomaterial sciences, biomedicine and related application domains - Good communication and presentation skills. - Strong technical writing skills. - Ability to work both independently and within a team. - Used to work under pressure under strict deadlines
*Conditions*
- The position will be located at BSC within the Life Sciences Department - We offer a full-time contract, a good working environment, a highly stimulating environment with state-of-the-art infrastructure, flexible working hours, extensive training plan, tickets restaurant, private health insurance, fully support to the relocation procedures - Duration: Open-ended contract due to technical and scientific activities linked to the project and budget duration - Salary: we offer a competitive salary commensurate with the qualifications and experience of the candidate and according to the cost of living in Barcelona - Starting date: ASAP
*About BSC*
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) is the leading supercomputing center in Spain. It houses MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, and is a hosting member of the PRACE European distributed supercomputing infrastructure. The mission of BSC is to research, develop and manage information technologies in order to facilitate scientific progress. BSC combines HPC service provision and R&D into both computer and computational science (life, earth and engineering sciences) under one roof, and currently has over 770 staff from 55 countries.
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Jochen L. Leidner -
Martin Krallinger