Professor Karen Sparck Jones died

Karen Sparck Jones, who was invited to give a keynote speech at SIGIR 2007, died yesterday morning aged 71.

Karen was a good friend to many within the information retrieval 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.

Karen Sparck Jones (26 August 1935 - 4 April 2007)

For additional information about Karen's life and distinguished research career, please see her personal web page), and the announcement of her death from Cambridge University).

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