IRLIST Digest ISSN 1064-6965 September 4, 1995 Volume XII, Number 34 Issue 271 Gerard Salton, Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, arguably the preeminent figure in the field of Information Retrieval, died of cancer on 28 August, in Ithaca, NY. He was 68. Gerry was born in Nurnberg, Germany, on 8 March 1927, the son of Rudolf and Elizabeth Sahlmann. He spent his youth in Germany, but World War II forced his family to flee Germany. Later, at one point, he and his brother were led across a border late at night, eluding German guards. Gerry came to the U.S. in 1947 and became a U.S. citizen in 1952. He married Mary Birnbaum in 1950. He attended Brooklyn College, where he received a B.A. (1950) and an M.A. (1952) in math. He received his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1958 and stayed on as an Instructor (1958-60) and Assistant Professor (1960-1965). Gerry was the last of Howard Aiken's Ph.D. students --and also one of the first programmers for the Harvard Mark IV computer. He was interested in natural-language processing, especially information retrieval, and began the SMART information retrieval system in the 1960's (allegedly, SMART is known as "Salton's Magical Automatic Retriever of Text"). Gerry came to Ithaca in 1965 as one of the founders of the Computer Science Department, the start of 30 years of distinguished service to Information Retrieval, Computer Science, and Cornell University. With his dedication and loyalty to the field, Gerry kept information retrieval alive through the late 1960's and 1970's, in spite of the lack of interest. The SMART information retrieval system was his main research tool, and ideas in this work fundamentally changed full-text processing methods on computers and provided the field of information retrieval with solid underpinnings. Under SMART, many well-known information retrieval concepts were introduced, including the vector space model, sophisticated statistical term weighting schemes that distinguish concepts important for text representation from other more marginal concepts, and the widely-used "relevance feedback" technique for query optimization. Today, dozens of well-known commercial systems use the ideas and technology developed in SMART: Individual (a newsclippings service) licensed the technology directly. Others such as WAIS (Wide Areas Information Server) and DOWQUEST (a tool for the Dow Jones newswire) are directly derived technology. Many new systems have leveraged off the years of research, including WIN (a legal retrieval system run by the West Publishing Company) and INQUERY (another eminent research tool). Professor Salton enjoyed writing and was very profilic. Throughout his career, he published five texts on information retrieval, the latest in 1989, and over 150 research articles in the field. Professor Salton received numerous awards for his research. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1962, and two of his books and papers won awards from the ASIS. He won a prestigious German "Alexander Humboldt Senior Scientist Award" in 1988 and the ASIS Award of merit in 1989. He became an ACM Fellow in 1995. In 1983, ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) established an Award for Outstanding Contributions. The first such award was given to Gerry, marking him as the preeminent figure in the field. Professor Salton gave a great deal of his time to the ACM. At various times, he was editor-in-chief of ACM Communications and the ACM Journal, and he was an editor of the ACM Transactions on Database Systems at the time of his death. He served on the ACM Council for 7 years and was a Northeast Regional Representative. He was active in SIGIR since its creation and served as its Chair in 1979-83. Gerry was also Chair of Section T of the AAAS for several years and was on the Board of Directors of the American Society for Information Science. Professor Salton exemplified the traditional eminent professor. He was professionally literate across a variety of subjects, from linguistics to German literature. He could express himself like a professor of English, yet he created a highly technical subject that depended heavily on computers and mathematics. He was a gifted writer, and one of his texts won an Award from the ASIS. He wrote many reviews for ACM Computing Reviews, and here too he excelled, receiving an award for the best review. Gerry upheld the highest standards of scholarship for himself, his students, and his colleagues. He was a nurturing, caring advisor. He supervised twenty Ph.D. students, who are now in both industry and academia. Recreation was an important part of Gerry's life. He was an avid concert-goer, rarely missing a Cornell concert, and spent many years on the Cornell University Faculty Committee on Music. He sailed, swam, and ice-skated regularly and was an enthusiastic supporter of Cornell ice-hockey. He skied regularly, cross-country and downhill, both in Ithaca and in Aspen, Colorado. He loved flowers and spent a great deal of time in the garden. Gerry is survived by his wife of 45 years, Mary Salton of Ithaca, NY; his daughter Mariann and her husband Richard Thompson of Cornish, NH; his son Peter and his wife Susan of Derry, NH; his brother Jean Sahlmann and his wife Agnes of Paris, France; his aunt Lotte Sahlmann of Fort Wayne, Indiana; and three grandchildren, Morgan Thompson, Kathryn Thompson, and Alex Salton. A memorial service will be held in Cornell's Anabel Taylor Hall on 29 September 1995 at 2PM. Please contact Cindy Robinson at Computer Science Department, Upson Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853 (cindy@cs.cornell.edu, phone: 607-255-0985). Contributions may be made to the Gerard Salton Distinguished Lectureship Series in Computer Science. The contact for this fund is Marsha Pickens, Carpenter Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853.