Karen Spärck Jones Lecture
Sponsored by BCS Academy of Computing, the Karen Spärck Jones Lecture honours women in computing research.
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.
2022 Karen Spärck Jones Lecture
Virtual event with three speakers
Date: Wednesday 30 March 2022
Speakers:
- Dr Karen Renaud, University of Strathclyde
- Dr Kelly Widdicks, Lancaster University
- Professor Lynn Kaack, Hertie School
Past lectures
The Karen Spärck Jones Lecture is an opportunity to hear from industry and academia speak about their work and their visions for the future.
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.
Sponsored by
