Frieder Wins 2007 Award for Outstanding Research in Information Science
Ophir Frieder, IITRI Chair, Professor of Computer Science, and Director of the Information Retrieval Laboratory at IIT, has won the 2007 American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Research Award. He will be presented the award at the society's annual meeting, which will be held in Milwaukee Oct. 19-24. Frieder is the Royden B. Davis, S.J., Chair in Interdisciplinary Studies for the 2007-08 academic year at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.
Founded in 1937, ASIS&T serves professionals who are advancing the theories, techniques and technologies to improve access to information. Its Research Award recognizes outstanding contributions to information science that have had a significant impact in the field. Saying Frieder "exemplifies the very ideals that this award celebrates," ASIS&T cited his work with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to solve a key information technology issue of the genome project—creating efficient sequencing tools. This significantly reduced computation time needed for analysis, according to ASIS&T.
The society also said Frieder was the first to "efficiently map all key information retrieval primitives to relational scripts without introducing non-standard operators." Commercial deployments based on such an approach are now common.
In addition, ASIS&T cited Frieder's 150 articles; nine patents (and more than a dozen patent applications) for inventions in information processing and communication networks; two co-authored textbooks (one on distributed information systems, the other on information retrieval); and research monograph on scalable gene sequencing.
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