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2017 Best Information Science Book Award

The winner of the Best Information Science Book Award is Interactions with Search Systems by Ryen W. White, published by Cambridge University Press. The award is given to the author whose book is judged to have made the most outstanding contribution in the field of information science during the calendar year preceding the ASIS&T annual meeting.

This book describes advances in technology, data availability, and searcher expectations around next-generation search engines. It provides a comprehensive review of research findings made over decades on how users interact with search systems, how the systems could model users’ interests and intentions, and more importantly, what new capabilities the next-generation systems should have and how they could support higher order search activities, such as learning and decision making. In doing so, the book serves not only as a comprehensive resource for
existing interactive search systems and methods, but also lays a foundation for what to come next in terms of providing people with right tools for information access and utilization. The book is well-structured, clearly written, and will serve the community as the point of reference for many years to come.

The author is Dr. Ryen W. White, who has had several significant roles at Microsoft. These include Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, CTO of Health Intelligence at Microsoft Health, and now the lead of Cortana Research. His research is focused on understanding search interaction and on developing tools to help people search more effectively. Dr. White’s doctoral research received the British Computer Society’s Distinguished Dissertation Award. He also received the 2014 Karen Spärck Jones Award for contributions to information retrieval. Dr. White’s research is featured in many Microsoft products.