Text Retrieval Expert Named Distinguished Scientist by Computing Group

Ellen Voorhees, leader of the text retrieval group in the Information Technology Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), was recently recognized as a "Distinguished Scientist" by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for establishing "key components of information retrieval evaluation methodology through individual research and directing international evaluation projects."

Voorhees has been a leading figure in organizing NIST's annual Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), which fosters research in information retrieval by creating the infrastructure required to do large-scale testing of retrieval technology. Information retrieval or search methodologies help find content that is not specially structured for computers. The technology is a key component of diverse applications including e-commerce, legal discovery, intelligence gathering, and scientific research, as well as Web search. More information about ACM distinguished scientists can be found at http://www.acm.org/news/featured/distinguished-09/. To learn more about the Text Retrieval Conference, see http://trec.nist.gov.