Residence United Kingdom Role Computer scientist Nationality British | Name Karen Jones Awards ACM-W Athena Lecturer | |
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Born 26 August 1935Huddersfield, Yorkshire ( 1935-08-26 ) Thesis Synonymy and Semantic Classification (1964) Died April 4, 2007, Willingham, United Kingdom Books Synonymy and Semantic Classification Similar People Yorick Wilks, Roger Needham, Andrew Herbert | ||
Bcs karen sp rck jones lecture 2016 prof m angela sasse
Karen Spärck Jones FBA (26 August 1935 – 4 April 2007) was a British computer scientist.
Contents
- Bcs karen sp rck jones lecture 2016 prof m angela sasse
- Karen sp rck jones lecture 2015
- Personal life
- Career
- Honours
- Awards
- Karen Sprck Jones Award
- References
Karen sp rck jones lecture 2015
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. 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. 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, 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. 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. 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. IDF is used in most search engines today, usually as part of the tf-idf weighting scheme.
There is an annual BCS lecture named in her honour.
Honours
Awards
Karen Spärck Jones Award
To commemorate her achievements, the Karen Spärck Jones Award was created in 2008 by the BCS and its Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG), which is sponsored by Microsoft Research.
The recipients are: