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