Karen Spärck Jones
Karen Spärck Jones (born August 26, 1935 in Huddersfield , Yorkshire , England , † April 4, 2007 ) was a British computer scientist and professor at Cambridge University .
Life
Karen Spärck Jones was born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England to Owen Jones, a chemistry professor, and Ida Spärck, a Norwegian who emigrated to Great Britain during World War II.
She attended Girton College from 1953 to 1956 . In 1958, during her time as a PhD student, she married Roger Needham . In the same year she published, together with her husband and Margaret Masterman , the work The analogy between mechanical translation and library retrieval and thus became an early representative of computational linguistics and information retrieval .
From 1965 to 1968 she did research at Newnham College and directly afterwards until 1980 at Darwin College . During this time it was published on the analysis of word frequencies in large amounts of text , which at that time computers could not store. The importance of this work is shown in the fact that it was published again in 1994, together with the findings of others, under the title Simple proven approaches to text retrieval and formed the basis of the AltaVista search engine . She was a librarian at Darwin College from 1973 to 1979. In 1994 she was President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). She officially retired on September 30, 2002, but continued to work in the computer laboratory. In 2002 she was treated for cancer, but it could not be completely defeated.
She died of cancer on April 4, 2007, but had been working until a few weeks before her death.
Awards
- Member of the British Academy , 1995
- ACL Lifetime Achievement Award 2007
- Lovelace Medal from the British Computer Society
- 2006 ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award
Web links
- Literature by and about Karen Spärck Jones in the catalog of the German National Library
- Obituary from the University of Cambridge
- Obituary on heise.de
literature
- SG Pulman: Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones, 1935-2007 . In: Proceedings of the British Academy . tape 166 , 2010, p. 273-298 ( thebritishacademy.ac.uk [PDF]).
Footnotes
- ^ "Computing is too important to be left to men" - on the death of Karen Spärck Jones , April 5, 2007 10:07
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Spark Jones, Karen |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British computer scientist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 26, 1935 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Huddersfield , Yorkshire , England |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 4, 2007 |