Karen Spärck Jones
| Karen Spärck Jones | |
|---|---|
Karen Spärck Jones in 2002
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| Born | 26 August 1935 Huddersfield, Yorkshire |
| Died | Script error: The function "death_date_and_age" does not exist. Willingham, Cambridgeshire |
| Residence | United Kingdom |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory |
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge |
| Thesis | Synonymy and Semantic Classification (1964[1]) |
| Doctoral advisor | Richard Braithwaite[2] |
| Known for | work on information retrieval and natural language processing, in particular her probabilistic model of document and text retrieval |
| Notable awards | ACL Lifetime Achievement Award, BCS Lovelace Medal, ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award, ACM SIGIR Salton Award, American Society for Information Science and Technology’s Award of Merit |
| Spouse | Roger Needham |
| Website www |
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Karen Spärck Jones FBA (26 August 1935 – 4 April 2007) was a British computer scientist.[3][4]
Contents
Personal life
Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones was born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England. Her father was Owen Jones, a lecturer in chemistry, and her mother was Ida Spärck, a Norwegian who moved to Britain during World War II. They left Norway on one of the last boats out after the German invasion in 1940.[2] Spärck Jones was educated at a grammar school in Huddersfield and then Girton College, Cambridge from 1953 to 1956, reading History, with an additional final year in Moral Sciences (philosophy). She briefly became a school teacher, before moving into Computer Science. During her career in Computer Science, she campaigned hard for more women to enter computing.[2] She was married to fellow Cambridge computer scientist Roger Needham until his death in 2003. She died 4 April 2007 at Willingham in Cambridgeshire.
Career
She worked at the Cambridge Language Research Unit from the late 1950s,[5] then at Cambridge's Computer Laboratory from 1974, and retired in 2002, holding the post of Professor of Computers and Information, which she was awarded in 1999.[2] She continued to work in the Computer Laboratory until shortly before her death. Her main research interests, since the late 1950s, were natural language processing and information retrieval.[6][7] One of her most important contributions was the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF) weighting in information retrieval, which she introduced in a 1972 paper.[6][8] IDF is used in most search engines today, usually as part of the tf-idf weighting scheme.[9] There is an annual BCS lecture named in her honour.[10]
Honours
- Fellow of the British Academy, of which she was Vice-President in 2000–02
- Fellow of AAAI
- Fellow of ECCAI
- President of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1994
Awards
- Gerard Salton Award (1988)
- ASIS&T Award of Merit (2002)
- ACL Lifetime Achievement Award (2004) [11]
- BCS Lovelace Medal (2007)
- ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award (2006)
References
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Further reading
- Computer Science, A Woman's Work, IEEE Spectrum, May 2007
External links
- Video: Natural Language and the Information Layer, Karen Spärck Jones, March 2007
- University of Cambridge obituary
- Obituary, The Independent, 12 April 2007[dead link]
- Obituary, The Daily Telegraph, 12 April 2007[dead link]
- Obituary, The Times, 22 June 2007 (subscription required)
| Awards and achievements | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | ACL Lifetime Achievement Award 2004 |
Succeeded by Martin Kay |
- Articles with dead external links from April 2014
- Pages containing links to subscription-only content
- 1935 births
- 2007 deaths
- Alumni of Girton College, Cambridge
- British computer scientists
- Women computer scientists
- Fellows of the British Academy
- Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
- Fellows of Newnham College, Cambridge
- Fellows of Wolfson College, Cambridge
- Members of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory
- People from Huddersfield
- Cancer deaths in England
- Information retrieval researchers
- British women scientists
- Artificial intelligence researchers
- 20th-century women scientists
