Karen Sparck Jones, a pioneer in automatic language processing and
information retrieval, has died of cancer. Karen was a good friend to
many within the IR community, and a leader in the best sense of the
word. She was known for a commitment
to excellence, support of junior researchers, and an influential and
productive research career that spanned six decades. She was a Fellow
of the British Academy, the AAAI, and the ECAAI and received numerous
awards for her research, including in the last year two awards from ACM
(Athena Lecturer, ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award) and one from the BCS
(Lovelace Medal). She was the second recipient of ACM SIGIR's Gerard
Salton Award.
For additional information about Karen's life and distinguished research
career, please see her web page (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~ksj21
the announcement of her death from Cambridge University
(http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk
