Karen Spärck Jones

A Karen Spärck Jones (Yorkshire, UK 1935-2006) dobbiamo i motori di ricerca come li conosciamo oggi.

Voleva avvicinare le donne all’informatica perché "essa è troppo importante per essere lasciata agli uomini”.

Padre inglese, docente di chimica, e madre norvegese, si è laureata in Filosofia divenendone insegnante. Sposata a uno scienziato informatico, nel 1972 pubblicò “A statistical interpretation of term specificity and its application in retrieval” che introduce il concetto di Inverse Document Frequency cui attinse Mike Burrows per il suo motore di ricerca Alta Vista.

Testo di Tiziana Ghiggia

Illustration by Michela Chiarelli

We owe search engines, as we know them today, to Karen Spärck Jones (Yorkshire, UK, 1935–2006).

She was passionate about introducing women to IT because she believed "it is too important to be left to men."

Her father was an English chemistry teacher, and her mother was Norwegian, working for the government. Karen graduated in Philosophy and initially became a teacher before transitioning into computer science.

Married to a computer scientist, in 1972 she published “A Statistical Interpretation of Term Specificity and Its Application in Retrieval,” which introduced the concept of Inverse Document Frequency (IDF)—a concept later used by Mike Burrows for his AltaVista search engine.