Stephen Robertson

Brief CV

Born 6 April 1946
email stephenerobertson -at- hotmail -dot- co -dot- uk

Career

• 2010 to date: Professor Emeritus, City University, London
• 2008-2023: Visiting Professor, University College London
• 2003 to date: Fellow of Girton College Cambridge (now Life Fellow)
• 1998-2013: Researcher/Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research Cambridge
• 1988-2009 (part-time 1998-2009): Professor of Information Systems, Department of Information Science, City University, London
• 1988-1996 Head of Department of Information Science
• 1978-88: Lecturer, then Reader, Department of Information Science, City University, London
• April-June 1981: Visiting Associate Professor, University of California Berkeley (Fulbright Award)
• 1973-78: Royal Society Scientific Information Research Fellow, School of Library Archive and Information Studies, University College London
• 1968-73: Research Officer, Aslib

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

• 2013: Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• 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

Some other activities

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.  Trustee of the John Campbell Trust.  Member of the panel of judges for the Salton Award, and also for the Karen Sparck Jones award.

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.  Keynote speaker, SIGIR 2009 Evaluation workshop.  Keynote speaker, ECIR 2010 Contextual Information Retrieval workshop.  Lectures at ESSIR (European Summer School for Information Retrieval) 2009.

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.

The Gerard Salton award in 2000 (I was the sixth awardee since 1983) was in recognition of the above contributions.

Notes

I am now retired.

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

August 2024