| Bell & Howell Co.’s Information and Learning business unit has
announced that Susan Feldman has won its annual Excellence In Writing award
for her article “The Answer Machine,” which appeared in the January 2000
issue of Searcher magazine (see https://www.infotoday.com/searcher/jan00/feldman.htm).
The award, which was founded in 1982 to recognize writers whose works
advance the use and understanding of information technology, was given
at the December Online Information conference in London. Feldman was presented
with a check for $1,500 in prize money, an all-expense-paid trip to the
London conference, and an etched crystal bowl.
“The Answer Machine” imagines the information system of the future.
The article explores technologies to create that system, starting with
how we interact with the computer. Feldman discusses the search process
itself and evaluates such techniques as natural language processing (NLP),
NLP-based technologies, concept extraction and mapping, change monitoring,
intelligent agents, speech recognition, and more. Appropriately applied,
these tools, she suggests, “will find information, organize it, keep it
up-to-date, forage for patterns, and present visual overviews for quick
understanding.”
Feldman is currently director of the Document and Content Technologies
Re-search Program at IDC in Framingham, Massachusetts. Prior to working
for IDC, she was president of Datasearch, an independent information consulting
firm specializing in the Internet and information-retrieval-related technologies,
which she founded in 1981. She is a frequent speaker and writer on such
topics as search engines and intelligent agents. She wrote the chapter
on search engines for the 1999 volume of the Encyclopedia of Library
and Information Sciences and served as the first editor of Digital
Library News, an electronic newsletter published by the IEEE Computer Society.
Feldman has a master’s degree in library science from the University
of Michigan and a B.A. in linguistics from Cornell University. She previously
won the Excellence In Writing award in 1998.
Entries for the 2001 Excellence In Writing award will be accepted through
September 2001. For a list of rules and eligibility, contact Tina Creguer
at Bell & Howell Information and Learning at 734/761-4700, ext. 3805,
or send e-mail inquiries to pr@bellhowell.infolearning.com.
Source: Bell & Howell Information and Learning, Ann Arbor, MI, 800/521-0600,
734/761-4700; http://www.infolearning.com. |
