Composition IX (Kandinsky)
Susan Dumais was awarded the Salton award at SIGIR this week.
I am not exactly breaking news here, but rather I wanted to write a post to honour this wonderful lady, especially since she helped me early on in my PhD research. I have followed her work for years now and I have a lot of respect for her passion, hard work and creativity. I’m a really huge fan of Microsoft research too the fact that Susan has been there so long is a testimony to the organisation. She has written so many brilliant papers and worked with some really amazing people.
Susan in her own words:
“I am interested in algorithms and interfaces for improved information retrieval, as well as general issues in and human-computer interaction. I joined Microsoft Research in July 1997. I work on a wide variety of information access and management issues, including: personal information management, web search, question answering, information retrieval, text categorization, collaborative filtering, interfaces for improved search and navigation, and user/task modeling.
I am interested in algorithms and interfaces for improved information retrieval, as well as general issues in and human-computer interaction. I joined Microsoft Research in July 1997. I work on a wide variety of information access and management issues, including: personal information management, web search, question answering, information retrieval, text categorization, collaborative filtering, interfaces for improved search and navigation, and user/task modeling.
Prior to coming to Microsoft, I worked on a statistical method for concept-based retrieval known as Latent Semantic Indexing. ”
Gerard Salton:
I also wanted to take a little time to remember Gerard Salton, who is still one of my greatest heroes.
Salton invented the SMART Retrieval System in 1971 at Cornell. He wrote and co-wrote so many papers on the subject of information retrieval and literally devoted his career to it. I came across Salton’s work early on in my computing life as all IR people do, and it wasn’t so much the brilliance of the research he did that marked me, it was this:
SMART (allegedly) stands for “Salton’s Magical Automatic Retriever of Text” because Salton believed that any good system should have an element of magic.
Now that’s really inspiring to read after you’ve spent days reading quite serious academese. More boring people call it “System for the Mechanical Analysis and Retrieval of Text”. The idea of “Magic” was silly and made me stop and think until I realised the entire thing was about magic.
For me that magic is the creativity that seems to emanate from all brilliant scientists, and interestingly many of them are also musicians, artists, photographers, dancers and more. Einstein was a rather good Violinist apparently and he felt it helped him solve scientific problems. I think there’s lot of truth in that.
So:
Susan received a well deserved award and through the award itself we remember all of those who came before: C.J. van Rijsbergen, W. Bruce Croft, Stephen Robertson, Tefko Saracevic, William Cooper, Cyril Cleverdon, Karen Spärck Jones. We look to the future of IR and I hope we can all inject a little of our own magic in there.
