Congratulations Nazli Goharian and Ophir Frieder on your new positions at Georgetown University.
	Congratulations, Evan Estola, Tristan Sloughter, and Jordan Wilberding on your new positions at Orbitz.
	Congratulations, to Wai Gen Yee and his IPRO team members (IPRO 327: A Video Annotation and Indexing System) for their first place finish in the Fall 2009 IPRO Day Information Technology Track.
	Congratulations to Nazli Goharian for the graduation of her first doctoral student, Saket Mengle.
	Congratulations to Saket Mengle for completing his doctoral studies and for his upcoming position at DataXu, Inc. in Boston. We wish him well in his new career.
	Congratulations to Tristan Sloughter forbeing selected as one of the 2009-2010 ARCS (Achievement Rewards for College Scientists) - Chicago Chapter Fellowships recipients.
	Congratulations to Saket Mengle for winning the "2009 Computer Science Department Student Best Paper Award" for his co-authored paper: S. Mengle and N. Goharian, "Ambiguity Measure Feature Selection Algorithm", Journal of American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60 (5), April 2009.
	Congratulations, once again, to Saket Mengle for winning the "2009 Computer Science Department Teaching Assistant of the Year Award".
	Congratulations to Wai Gen Yee for winning the "2009 Computer Science Department Teacher of the Year Award".
	Congratulations to Wai Gen for winning the Interprofessional Projects (IPRO) Program Spring 2009 Interprofessional Projects Day Outstanding Faculty Award in recognition of his outstanding teaching, as nominated by a student IPRO team.
	Congratulations to Nazli Goharian for being awarded the 2009 Julia Beveridge Award. Julia Beveridge was widely recognized for her contributions to the institution and for her strong leadership and determination. The annual presentation of this award recognizes the importance of such commitment to the university and it evokes the memory of all that Beveridge exemplified as a teacher, administrator and human being. Well done!
	Congratulations to Linh Nguyen for defending his Ph.D. on March 24, 2009! Good luck at Orbitz!
	Congratulations to Evan Estola and Andrew Yates for being selected for IIT's Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship for the summer of 2009. They will do research under Douglas Cork and Wai Gen Yee, respectively.
	Congratulations to Tristan Sloughter for being selected as one of the 2008-2009 ARCS (Achievement Rewards for College Scientists) - Chicago Chapter Fellowships recipients.
	Congratulations to Dongmei Jia for defending her Ph.D. on August 25, 2008! Good luck at Amazon!
	Congratulations to Jay Urbain for defending his Ph.D. on August 11, 2008! Good luck at MSOE!
	Congratulations to Wai Gen Yee and his collaborators for their "Best Paper Award" in the ACM/ICST 3rd International Conference on Scalable Information Systems (INFOSCALE). The paper is entitled: W. G. Yee, L. Nguyen, D. Jia, and O. Frieder, "Efficient Query Routing by Improved Peer Description in P2P Networks"
	Congratulations to Tayo Obafemi-Ajayi for winning the 2008 SPIE Document Recognition and Retrieval XV Best Student Paper Award for her paper: T. Obafemi-Ajayi, G. Agam, and O. Frieder, "Ensemble LUT Classification for Degraded Document Enhancement", 2008 SPIE Document Recognition and Retrieval XV, San Jose, CA, January 2008.
	The second edition of the Grossman & Frieder information retrieval book is finally out, and it is actually selling for only $38 at Springer-online (under $30 if you adopt it for a course)! For more information, please contact: Robbert van Berckelaer D. Grossman and O. Frieder, Information Retrieval: Algorithms and Heuristics, Second Edition 2004, Springer Publishers, ISBN 1-4020-3003-7 (hardcover), 1-4020-3004-5 (paperback). You can view the slides that follow the book for lectures here.