The Microsoft BCS/BCS IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award 2017 will be awarded to Fernando Diaz, Director of Research at Spotify. According to the KSJ award site, "Fernando has made major contributions in both IR and NLP is in the very spirit of the award." He will give a keynote address at the 40th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2018) in Grenoble, France in March 2018. A CIIR alum, Fernando received his Ph.D. from UMass Amherst Computer Science in 2008. Prior to Spotify, he was a senior researcher and founding member of Microsoft Research New York. More at: https://irsg.bcs.org/ksjaward.php.