Thoroughly enjoyed giving the STEPS Distinguished Lecture on Big Data at ENI in Milan last week. A big thank you to Halliburton and ENI for inviting me, arranging and making me feel so welcome. Some fascinating questions!

First large scale empirical study of enterprise search & discovery capability published in the Journal of Information Science (JIS) this week. Here Many organizations have deployed ‘Google-like’ enterprise search engines in order to improve access to their own information, a key part of the digital workplace. Despite significant investments, it has been reported that dissatisfaction... Continue Reading →

Invited to give the Distinguished Lecture on Big Data next month for the Science and Technology Exploration and Production (STEPS) program run by Halliburton. The program aims to foster geoscience excellence through the facilitation of thematic research and offers the opportunity for academics to engage with Landmark (Halliburton) and the wider exploration and production community.... Continue Reading →

Delighted to receive award last month from Professor Vivien Petras and Professor Joseph Tennis at the iSchool conference. Very big thankyou again to all those that have supported me and contributed to this success.

A research paper I co-authored with Laura Muir, Associate Professor at the School of Computing Edinburgh Napier University has been published this week in the Journal of Knowledge Organization. It is being increasingly recognized that sentiment analysis is a key part of enterprise search & discovery capability. We applied sentiment analysis to public oil company... Continue Reading →

Measuring user satisfaction with an enterprise search tool can be difficult. Feedback mechanisms on the user interface tend to only capture a small self-selected sample that may be skewed towards negative views. Whilst surveys can capture more data, they are also self-selecting and tend to be small scale compared to actual enterprise usage. Clickthrough data... Continue Reading →

Along with 450 academics and practitioners, I attended the iSchools Transforming Digital Worlds conference this week at the University of Sheffield. Some fascinating presentations on information behaviour, information seeking and information retrieval. I was particularly interested in the keynote from  Dr Lynn Connaway. Many of the messages although not new and perhaps well known to some,... Continue Reading →

I gave a lecture this week on search & analytics to students on the online Petroleum Data Management course at Robert Gordon University. Some excellent discussions, debate, questions and a thoroughly enjoyable session with knowledgeable students mostly in full time employment from around the world. My topic was 'Beyond the Search Box and Ten Blue Links'.... Continue Reading →

Geoscience-aware text sentiment algorithm improves on out-of-the-box specific sentiment tools like IBM Watson, Google, Microsoft and Amazon by over 30% for geoscience sentiment in text. Presented early research findings today at the Janet Watson ‘Big Data in the Geosciences’ conference at the Geological Society of London. Google opened proceedings with a talk on Satellite Imagery... Continue Reading →