Keynote speech by ACM Athena Lecturer Karen Spärck Jones

The ACM named Karen Spärck Jones the 2007 ACM Athena Lecturer. Athena Lectures celebrate women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. We are proud to announce that Karen Spärck Jones will give an invited talk at SIGIR 2007 in Amsterdam.

Karen Spärck Jones is emeritus professor in Computers and Information at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK. She has worked in automatic language and information processing research since the late fifties, beginning her career at the then Cambridge Language Research Unit. She has many publications including several books: her 1964 thesis, Synonymy and semantic classification was published by Edinburgh University Press in 1986, and she is joint author with J.R. Galliers of Evaluating natural language processing systems, Springer, 1996. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, was President of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1994, and has received two awards for information retrieval research. She has been a member of the DARPA/NIST Text Retrieval Conferences Programme Committee since 1994, and involved with other US evaluation programmes, notably the Document Understanding Conferences on automatic summarising. Her work in the last decade has been on document retrieval including speech applications, database querying, user and agent modelling, summarising, and information and language system evaluation. She taught for the MPhil in Computer Speech and Language Processing, on language systems, and for the Computer Science Tripos on information retrieval.

Each year the ACM's Committee on Women in Computing honors a preeminent woman computer scientist as the Athena Lecturer. Athena is the Greek goddess of wisdom; with her wisdom and sense of purpose, and her willingness to enter the fray, Athena epitomizes the strength, determination, and intelligence of the "Athena Lecturers."

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