Karen Spärck Jones Lecture
The Karen Spärck Jones Lecture recognises and celebrates women in computing research in the UK.
About the Lecture
This lecture is held in honour of Karen Spärck Jones, one of the most remarkable women in computer science. A Fellow of the British Academy, she had a long, rich and remarkable career as a pioneer of information science from the very early days of computing.
The lecture is a unique opportunity to celebrate some of today’s most inspirational women in computing research who are advancing computing for the benefit of society.
2023 Karen Spärck Jones Lecture
Hybrid event with multiple speakers
Date: Tuesday 6 June 2023
Speakers:
Dr Kanta Dihal, University of Cambridge
Dr Huma Shah, Coventry University
Dr Samara Banno, University of London
Past lectures
The Karen Spärck Jones Lecture is an opportunity to hear from leading researchers in industry and academia, to learn about their work, careers, and hopes for the future of computing.
About Karen Spärck Jones
Karen Spärck Jones (1935–2007) was Professor of Computing and Information at the University of Cambridge and a pioneer of information science. A Fellow of the British Academy, where she was Vice-President from 2000 to 2002, she enjoyed a long and remarkable career which began in the very early days of computing. Her work is among the most highly cited in the field and has influenced a whole generation of researchers and practitioners. She received several major awards including, in 2004, the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award and, in 2007, the BCS Lovelace Medal and the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award. She made outstanding theoretical contributions to information retrieval and natural language processing, and built upon this theoretical framework through numerous experiments. She introduced Inverse Document Frequency (IDF) term weighting, a statistical measure used to evaluate how important a word is to a document - now adopted as standard in systems such as web search engines to score and rank a document’s relevance to a search query.
