Gerard Salton

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Gerard Salton (born March 8, 1927 in Nuremberg; † August 28, 1995 ) was Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University , Ithaca , NY , USA . His research and his involvement in professional associations and organizations had a significant influence on the development of information retrieval as an independent research area.

biography

Salton was born on March 8, 1927 in Nuremberg as Gerhard Anton Sahlmann, son of Rudolf and Elisabeth Sahlmann, into a German-Jewish merchant family. His family fled from Nazi Germany in 1938, first to Belgium, from there to France and finally to Switzerland. In 1947 Gerard Salton immigrated to the USA, where he was naturalized in 1952. In 1950 he married Mary Birnbaum. The marriage had two children.

Gerard Salton completed a bachelor's (until 1950) and master's degree (until 1952) in mathematics at Brooklyn College. In 1958 he received his doctorate from Harvard University under Howard Aiken . He taught at Harvard until 1965, first as a lecturer (1958–1960), then as an assistant professor (1960–1965). In 1965 he was appointed to a professorship in computer science at Cornell University as one of the founding members of the Institute for Computer Science. Gerard Salton has held visiting professorships at the University of Grenoble, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich , the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne and the University of Konstanz .

research

The development of the SMART system (System for the Manipulation and Retrieval of Text), one of the most influential experimental information retrieval systems of all, began during his time at Harvard. This system, which was further developed and refined over 30 years of academic research under the aegis of Gerard Salton, was the basis for the definition and experimental verification of the vector space model (see Dubin 2004) of information retrieval. Other information retrieval issues to which the research work on the SMART system made important contributions are frequency-based term weighting, relevance feedback , passage retrieval and the automatic generation of hypertext links.

Work in professional associations

Gerard Salton knew how to promote and safeguard his research area by working in research organizations and associations. Among the functions that he has performed, the following are particularly noteworthy:

  • Member of the board of the ACM
  • Spokesman for SIGIR, the ACM's Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval .

Awards and honors

  • 1962 Guggenheim scholarship
  • 1983 “Award for Outstanding Contributions” from SIGIR. This prize has been presented by SIGIR since 1995 as the “Gerard Salton Award”.
  • 1988 "Humboldt Senior Scientist Award"
  • 1989 ASIS & T award
  • 1970 ASIS & T (American Society for Information Science & Technology) award for best scientific article and
  • 1975 ASIS & T award for the best information science book
  • 1995 "Fellow of the ACM "

Gerard Salton Award from ACM SIGIR

In memory of Gerard Salton's achievements in the research field of information retrieval, the Information Retrieval (SIGIR) group of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) awards the Gerard Salton Award every three years , the highest scientific honor in the field of information Retrieval applies. Most recently, the computer scientist Kalervo P. Jarvelin received the award in 2018. Gerard Salton himself was the first to receive the award in 1983; the award was renamed in his honor after his death.

Publications and Editing

Gerard Salton has published more than 100 scientific articles and books:

Salton's textbooks on information retrieval made a big impact

  • Salton, Gerard: Automatic Information Organization and Retrieval, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1968.
  • Salton, Gerard; McGill, Michael J .: Introduction to modern information retrieval, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1983.
  • Salton, Garard: Automatic Text Processing: The Transformation, Analysis, and Retrieval of Information by Computer. Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1989.

Gerard Salton was editor-in-chief and co-editor of the following magazines

  • "Communications of the ACM"
  • "Journal of the ACM"
  • "ACM Transactions on Database Systems"
  • "ACM Transactions on Information Systems"

Web links

literature

  • David Dubin: The most influential paper Gerard Salton never wrote . Library Trends, Spring 2004. Full text

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Awards ( English ) SIGIR. Retrieved April 20, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME Salton, Gerard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sahlmann, Gerhard Anton
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American computer scientist
DATE OF BIRTH March 8, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Nuremberg
DATE OF DEATH August 28, 1995