Kalervo Järvelin 60 years: Reseach enabling information to be fully accessible for all

Kalervo Järvelin is a professor at the Department of Information Studies, University of Tampere. He has authored over 200 scholarly publications and supervised close to twenty doctoral dissertations. Professor Järvelin has served the ACM SIGIR Conferences as a program committee member, Conference Chair and Program Co-Chair. He is an Associate Editor of Information Processing and Management.

Driven by the idea that information should be fully accessible for all, regardless of format, language or location, professor Järvelin has conducted research on information retrieval. Specific research topics in information retrieval have included dealing with the morphologic complexity, analyzing the vocabulary mismatch between query and text, developing optimal methods for assessing relevance of search returns, analyzing specific task settings and simulating human information behavior. In 2000, Kalervo Järvelin and Jaana Kekäläinen received the SIGIR Best Paper Award for their paper "IR evaluation methods for retrieving highly relevant documents". This and their other paper "Cumulated gain-based evaluation of IR techniques" have become very highly cited. In 2002, Järvelin chaired the SIGIR 2002 conference in Tampere, Finland. In 2008, Järvelin received the Tony Kent Strix Award in recognition of an outstanding contribution to the field of information retrieval. The latest remarkable international recognition was given by American Society for Information Science (ASIS) for Research in Information Science.

University of Tampere organized a seminar to celebrate professor Kalervo Järvelin's 60th anniversary on Friday, 30th of August 2013. Professor Pertti Vakkari opened the seminar, describing Järvelin's numerous achievements and his positive personality as a colleague. Invited talks were given by Diane Kelly (Charting the Turn: A Brief History of Interactive Information Retrieval), Timo Honkela (Relevance and meaning: Interplay between objective and subjective), and Turid Hedlund (Avoin tiedon saatavuus ja mobiili tietoyhteistyö). Urpu Ilasmaa presented memories from a family album. Ilkka Mäkinen presented a poem that described different aspects of Järvelin's academic and personal profile.