The Evvie "best paper award" for 2008 on Day Two of Infonortics' Boston Search Engine Meeting was announced by Stephen A. Arnold of ArnoldIT.com.The award for best paper was won by Charles Clarke of University of Waterloo. Called "XML Retrieval: Problems and Potential", the work explained that XML (Extensible Markup Language) is no panacea, but that properly used, XML systems create new ways to make search more useful to users. Clarke, being associate professor for the School of Computer Science at the university in Waterloo, Ontario, received a cash prize and an engraved Evvie award.
For his paper "Search, Sense-Making and Visual User Interfaces", Richard Brath of Oculus was named runner-up. Brath demonstrated in this paper, that user interface becomes as important as the underlying content processing functions for search. Brath is a partner at a provider of innovative business visualization software solutions, called Oculus. He received an engraved Evvie award.
Being given in honor of Ev Brenner, one of the leaders in online information systems and functions, the Evvie award was established after Brenner's death in 2006. Since its inception almost 20 years ago, Brenner served on the program committee for the Boston Search Engine Meeting. He had two characteristics that made his participation a signature feature of each year's program: He was willing to tell a speaker or paper author to "add more content," and after a presentation, he would ask a presenter one or more penetrating questions that helped make a complex subject more clear.
To keep Brenner's push for excellence squarely in the minds of the speakers and the conference attendees, the Evvie is sponsored by ArnoldIT.com.
This year's judges were Dr. David Evans, Just Systems (Tokyo), Dr. Liz Liddy, Syracuse University, and Sue Feldman, IDC Content Technologies Group. Liddy heads the Center for Natural Language Processing. Evans, founder of Clairvoyance, is one of the foremost authorities on search. Feldman is one of the leading analysts in the search, content processing, and information access market sector.
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