Given it's been seven hours with no comments, I guess she's still going to be overlooked. Presumably nobody has ever heard of her, this is certainly the first time I've seen her name and I worked at Google for years.
Perhaps she's not well known because her contribution to search engines can be summed up like this: "if a word appears a lot in a document, but not in other documents, it's probably important to the content of this document". I'm not sure such an insight really deserves to be credited to anyone, let alone yield an obituary in the New York times. It seems very obvious to me and the sort of thing that would occur to anyone writing a search engine but ...
Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people whose deaths went unreported in The Times.
... ah :(
Perhaps Sparck Jones' death went unremarked in the New York Times at the time because she is, in fact, unremarkable? She died in 2007 having spent a lifetime in academia, and the above rule seems to be the only thing she's known for (according to Wikipedia). It appears that the only reason she's getting an obituary now is because she's a woman and Nellie Bowles (who appears to write specifically about gender in the tech industry [1]) wanted to write an article about a female computer scientist.
Will we get an article about overlooked male primary school teachers now? I am doubting it.
I think it's more accurate to say that the word weighting technique she created isn't directly related to search engines. Certainly weighting The importance of an occurrence of a words is important in many applications. Natural language processing, document categorization, and more. Web search among them. The article, though, seems trying pretty hard to portray it as laying the foundations for applications like Google search which is an awkward connection to make. If nothing else consider the time frame: this word indexing technique was published in 1972, while the first mainstream search engines came about two decades later.
She won the ACL lifetime achievement in 2004, a fellow of the British Academy, etc., it's not like she was completely overlooked in her field, just not a very public figure. Everyone I know in NLP recognizes the importance of her work.
Pretty mainstream search engines like LexisNexis and Bloomberg were around for quite awhile before Google (and her work was even more relevant to pre-web search engines where there were not as many other signals other than the text).
A lot of scientific insights are obvious in hindsight. IMO especially in applied mathematics, but maybe that's just because it's a field I know well enough to notice.
A lot of ideas are obvious even without hindsight (again, especially in applied mathematics, and again, maybe that's just my bias). None-the-less, the person who said it first gets their name on the important idea.
There are lots of "<person's name> operator" and "<person's name> theorem" in big-but-not-core fields of (again, esp applied) mathematics where this phenomenon occurs.
I've been party to a lot of conversations that go something like "<person's name> idea or <person's name> technique is just '<fairly basic thing> applied to <fairly commonplace thing>' and it's stupid that it's named after <person's name>".
I always remind the speaker that this is good news -- one route to science fame is to just state the obvious loudly enough and early enough ;-)
Great quote, and even more true today
“There is an interaction between the context and the programming task itself,” she said. “You don’t need a fundamental philosophical discussion every time you put finger to keyboard, but as computing is spreading so far into people’s lives, you need to think about these things.”
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 24.6 ms ] threadPerhaps she's not well known because her contribution to search engines can be summed up like this: "if a word appears a lot in a document, but not in other documents, it's probably important to the content of this document". I'm not sure such an insight really deserves to be credited to anyone, let alone yield an obituary in the New York times. It seems very obvious to me and the sort of thing that would occur to anyone writing a search engine but ...
Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people whose deaths went unreported in The Times.
... ah :(
Perhaps Sparck Jones' death went unremarked in the New York Times at the time because she is, in fact, unremarkable? She died in 2007 having spent a lifetime in academia, and the above rule seems to be the only thing she's known for (according to Wikipedia). It appears that the only reason she's getting an obituary now is because she's a woman and Nellie Bowles (who appears to write specifically about gender in the tech industry [1]) wanted to write an article about a female computer scientist.
Will we get an article about overlooked male primary school teachers now? I am doubting it.
[1] https://www.wweek.com/technology/2018/03/12/while-startups-i...
Pretty mainstream search engines like LexisNexis and Bloomberg were around for quite awhile before Google (and her work was even more relevant to pre-web search engines where there were not as many other signals other than the text).
A lot of ideas are obvious even without hindsight (again, especially in applied mathematics, and again, maybe that's just my bias). None-the-less, the person who said it first gets their name on the important idea.
There are lots of "<person's name> operator" and "<person's name> theorem" in big-but-not-core fields of (again, esp applied) mathematics where this phenomenon occurs.
I've been party to a lot of conversations that go something like "<person's name> idea or <person's name> technique is just '<fairly basic thing> applied to <fairly commonplace thing>' and it's stupid that it's named after <person's name>".
I always remind the speaker that this is good news -- one route to science fame is to just state the obvious loudly enough and early enough ;-)