Gerard Salton

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Gerard Salton (8 March 1927 in Nuremberg - 28 August 1995) was a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Salton was perhaps the leading computer scientist working in the field of information retrieval during his time. His group at Cornell developed the SMART Information Retrieval System.

Salton was born Gerhard Anton Sahlmann on March 8, 1927 in Nuremberg, Germany. He received a Bachelor's (1950) and Master's (1952) degree in mathematics from Brooklyn College, and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1958, the last of Howard Aiken's doctoral students, and taught there until 1965, when he joined Cornell University and co-founded its department of Computer Science. He was editor-in-chief of the Communications of the ACM and the Journal of the ACM, and chaired SIGIR.

Salton was an ACM Fellow (elected 1995), received an Award of Merit from the American Society for Information Science (1989), and was the first recipient of the SIGIR Award for outstanding contributions to study of information retrieval (1983) -- now called the Gerard Salton Award.

[edit] Bibliography

  • Salton, Automatic Information Organization and Retrieval, 1968.
  • --- and Michael J. McGill, Introduction to modern information retrieval, 1983. ISBN 0-07-054484-0
  • DBLP Bibliography

[edit] External links

  • In Memoriam
  • The Most Influential Paper Gerard Salton Never Wrote - This 2004 Library Trends paper by David Dubin serves as a historical review of the metamorphasis of the term discrimination value model (TDV) into the vector space model as an information retrieval model (VSM as an IR model). This paper calls into question what the Information Retrieval research community believed Salton's vector space model was originally intended to model. What much later became an information retrieval model was originally a data-centric mathematical/computational model used as an explanatory device. In addition, Dubin's paper points out that a 1975 Salton paper oft cited, does not exist but is probably a combination of two other papers, neither of which actually refer to the VSM as an IR model.
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