http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/misc/obituaries/sparck-jones/
Quoting from IEEE Spectrum May 2007:
In a fascinating interview with BCS managing editor Brian Runciman after she received the Lovelace medal, Spärck Jones said: "I certainly think that professionalism is very important....To be a proper professional you need to think about the context and motivation and justifications of what you're doing....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....I've always felt that once you see how important computing is for life you can't just leave it as a blank box and assume that somebody reasonably competent and relatively benign will do something right with it."
At a time when computer science enrollments in the United States have plummeted, how important it is to be reminded by this remarkable woman that computer science is not a commodity to be outsourced or a big of tricks for building better word processors, but a discipline, a science, that is central to solving human problems and realizing human dreams.
내 전공 분야와는 상관없어서 실은 연구업적에 대해서 잘은 모른다. 하지만 "term weighting"과 같은 방법은 고안하였고, 수식이나 코드 대신 일상단어를 통해 컴퓨터를 사용하는 방법 연구을 통해 search engine 개발의 모태를 제공하였다고 한다. 지금은 누구나 다 알고 쓰는 기술들이 만들어지기까지는 이런 visionary 과학자가 필요한 것이다.