Jamie Callan forwarded this sad news to the SIGIR List today:
Karen Sparck Jones, a pioneer in automatic language processing and information retrieval, has died of cancer. Karen was a good friend to many within the IR community, and a leader in the best sense of the word. She was known for a commitment to excellence, support of junior researchers, and an influential and productive research career that spanned six decades. She was a Fellow of the British Academy, the AAAI, and the ECAAI and received numerous awards for her research, including in the last year two awards from ACM (Athena Lecturer, ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award) and one from the BCS (Lovelace Medal). She was the second recipient of ACM SIGIR’s Gerard Salton Award.For additional information about Karen’s life and distinguished research career, please see her web page (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~ksj21/), and the announcement of her death from Cambridge University (http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/news/dp/2007040403).
I met Karen a few times at various conferences. She was clearly one of the great minds of search, and was one of the key people who ensured the tradition of rigor in detailing experimental results at conferences like SIGIR and RIAO. She will be missed.