Karen Spärck Jones

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Karen Spärck Jones

Karen Spärck Jones in 2002
Born	26 August 1935 Huddersfield, Yorkshire
Died	4 April 2007 Willingham, Cambridgeshire
Residence	United Kingdom
Nationality	British
Field	Computer science
Institution	University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory
Alma mater	University of Cambridge
Known for	work on information retrieval and natural language processing, in particular her probabilistic model of document and text retrieval
Notable prizes	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
Husband: Roger Needham

Karen Spärck Jones FBA (b. 26 August 1935 – d. 4 April 2007) was a British computer scientist.

She worked at Cambridge's Computer Laboratory from 1974, and retired in 2002, holding the post of Professor of Computers and Information. 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.

Prof. Spärck Jones was a Fellow of the British Academy, of which she was Vice-President in 2000-02. She was also a Fellow of both the AAAI and the ECCAI and was President of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1994. She received several awards for her research including the Gerard Salton Award (1988), the ASIS&T Award of Merit (2002), the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award (2004), the BCS Lovelace Medal (2007) and the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award (2007).

She was married to Roger Needham until his death in 2003.

[edit] References

• Computer Laboratory obituary
• Karen Spärck Jones' homepage with a brief biography
• University of Cambridge obituary
• Karen Spärck Jones and Summarization
• Charting a New Course: Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval –Essays in Honour of Karen Spärck Jones

Persondata
NAME	Spärck Jones, Karen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Needham, Karen
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Computer scientist
DATE OF BIRTH	August 26, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH	[Huddersfield]], Yorkshire
DATE OF DEATH	April 4, 2007
PLACE OF DEATH	Willingham, Cambridgeshire