Overlooked No More: Karen Sparck Jones, Who Established the Basis for Search Engines
The New York Times highlights the life and work of the inspiring Karen Sparck Jones.
When most scientists were trying to make people use code to talk to computers, Karen Sparck Jones taught computers to understand human language instead.
In so doing, her technology established the basis of search engines like Google.
A self-taught programmer with a focus on natural language processing, and an advocate for women in the field, Sparck Jones also foreshadowed by decades Silicon Valley’s current reckoning, warning about the risks of technology being led by computer scientists who were not attuned to its social implications.