Professor Kando is the founder and driving force of NTCIR, the text retrieval development and evaluation initiative and service in Asia. NTCIR is recognised worldwide for its transformational and far-reaching contributions to advancing interactive IR, educating IR researchers and developing IR science in many areas including multilingual and multimodal information access, natural language processing and IR systems evaluation. Her pioneering leadership has played a fundamental role in building an international IR infrastructure, nurturing the emergence of a vibrant and growing research community across East Asia and beyond.
The Strix award honours outstanding contributions to the field in memory of Tony Kent, a remarkable IR pioneer. It was inaugurated in 1998 by the Institute of Information Scientists and is now presented by UKeiG in partnership with the International Society for Knowledge Organisation UK (ISKO UK), the Royal Society of Chemistry Chemical Information and Computer Applications Group (RSC CICAG) and the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG). Whereas at the time of Kent’s ground-breaking achievements IR was a fascinating sideline for relatively few specialists, nowadays the ‘search function’ underpins everyday living at home, at work and across the globe. This Strix Award is more widely relevant than ever before.
Professor Kando was delighted to receive the news and will celebrate her award in a special free Zoom lecture at 10 am London time on Friday 30th January 2026.
Book here:
https://www.cilip.org.uk/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=2025044&group=201314
The nomination included letters of support from distinguished information scientists Dr. Ellen M. Voorhees (National Institute of Standards and Technology), Prof. Maarten de Rijke (University of Amsterdam), Prof. Iadh Ounis (University of Glasgow) and Prof. Nicola Ferro (University of Padua).
Co-signatories of the nomination were:
- Prof. Douglas W. Oard, University of Maryland
- Prof. Mark Sanderson, RMIT University
- Prof. Charles L. A. Clarke, University of Waterloo
- Prof. Tetsuya Sakai, Waseda University
- Prof. Yiqun Liu, Tsinghua University
- Prof. Hideo Joho, University of Tsukuba
- Prof. Zhicheng Dou, Renmin University of China
- Assoc. Prof. Takehiro Yamamoto, University of Hyogo
The Strix award judging panel would like to thank all colleagues who submitted nominations, and we look forward to your submissions in 2026. The excellence and quality of the entries is proof positive that the information retrieval community is not just thriving but expanding.