In recognizing his contributions to the field of information retrieval, Associate Professor Hongning Wang from the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University has been bestowed with the 2023 Karen Spärck Jones Award. This prestigious accolade was presented at the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2024) conference in Malta on March 18, 2024.

The British Computer Society (BCS) established the Karen Spärck Jones Award to commemorate the pioneering work of Professor Karen Spärck Jones in information retrieval. The award annually recognizes one individual globally for their contributions to the fields of information retrieval and natural language processing.

Professor Wang’s research in personalized information retrieval and optimization methods for retrieval and recommender systems, along with his application of game theoretical solutions, distinguished him as this year’s sole recipient. During the award ceremony, Professor Wang captivated the audience with his keynote speech titled “Human vs. Generative AI in Content Creation Competition: Symbiosis or Conflict?”

Professor Wang obtained his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the United States in 2014. He is currently an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University. He was a Copenhaver associate professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia in the United States. His research interest mainly lies at the intersection of machine learning and information retrieval, focusing on creating reinforcement learning and game theoretical methods with complete theoretical properties and efficient practical performance to solve personalized decision-making problems.