News Story

Tom Heath wins ‘PhD of the Year’ Award

Enrico Motta, Sunday 7 Jun 2009

Former KMi PhD student Tom Heath has been awarded the prestigious "PhD of the Year" prize, which is assigned every year to the most promising researcher in the STi International academic network. Tom was given the prize at a ceremony held during the organisation’s recent offsite meeting in Kalamaki, Crete. KMi’s John Domingue, President of STI International, announced the unanimous decision of the award panel, and introduced Tom, who presented his work to the audience.

Tom’s doctoral research explored how trust relationships affect the information seeking processes in social networks. The empirical findings from this work were used to develop algorithms and systems which help users to locate information by exploiting the recommendations posted by members of their social networks. In the course of his PhD, supervised by Enrico Motta, Marian Petre and Martin Dzbor, Tom developed several systems as test beds for his research, including Hoonoh.com and Revyu.com, which won first prize in the 2007 International Semantic Web Challenge.