Computer Science, A Woman's Work

Computer scientist extraordinaire Karen Spärck Jones, professor emeritus of computer and information at the University of Cambridge, died last month of cancer. Shortly before that, she got to see her life's work in natural language processing and information retrieval receive even more acclaim than ever from major computer science institutions around the globe. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) had chosen her to receive both the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award and the ACM-W Athena Lecturer Award. And only weeks before that, she was also awarded the prestigious Lovelace Medal by the British Computer Society (BCS). The woman they honored pioneered techniques that allow people to work with computers using ordinary words instead of equations or codes, a breakthrough that was important in the subsequent development of search engines. According to the ACM, she also discovered term weighting, a statistical method used to evaluate how important any given word is in a set of documents, and thus the word's significance for an individual document.