For pioneering contributions to approaches that now dominate the search industry, ACM SIGIR honors Norbert Fuhr from the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany) with the 2012 Gerard Salton Award. Fuhr developed probabilistic retrieval models for databases and XML, and his research on probabilistic models anticipated the current interest in learning to rank approaches in search operations. Fuhr received the award at the ACM SIGIR Conference in Portland, Oregon, USA, where he gave the opening keynote address. Read more in the ACM Press release.