Information technology has rarely won an Ig Nobel award in the 18 years the prizes have been doled out by the Improbable Research organization.

Should we take the snub personally?
Marc Abrahams, the editor of Improbable Research, the organization's blog, says he thinks IT's relative absence is simply because the field is younger than other disciplines. "Certainly IT offers the same level of absurdity as other areas of research," he says comfortingly.
He points out that Murphy's Law, whose three "inventors" (John Paul Stapp, Edward A. Murphy, Jr. and George Nichols,) were honored with an Ig Nobel in 2003, sprang from an IT-like project in the late 1940s. Murphy was an electrical engineer who was brought in to help the Air Force figure out why safety tests they were conducting weren't producing any results. Murphy discovered that the electronic monitoring systems had been installed "backwards and upside down," according to Abrahams, which discovery caused him to mutter the first version of the law that bears his name.
Other Ig Nobels drawn from the world of technology include:
2001: John Keogh of Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia, won in the Technology category for patenting the wheel; he shared the award with the Australian Patent Office, which granted him Innovation Patent #2001100012 (pdf) for a "circular transportation facilitation device."
2000: Chris Niswander of Tucson, Ariz., won a Computer Science Ig Nobel for his development of PawSense, software that can tell when a cat is walking across your keyboard and make a sound to scare it off.
1997: Sanford Wallace -- yes, that Sanford Wallace -- of Cyber Promotions takes the Communications Ig Nobel for being the Spam King.
The Ig Nobels, it must be remembered, aren't into value judgments.