Salton dies; was leader in information retrieval field

Gerard Salton, a professor of computer science at Cornell University, "arguably the preeminent figure in the field of information retrieval," died of cancer in August, a Cornell press release said. He was 68.

Salton was born in NÅrnberg, Germany, in 1927, but was forced to flee the country during World War II. He came to the United States in 1947 and became a US citizen in 1952. He received a B.A. (1950) and an M.A. (1952) in mathematics from Brooklyn College.

Salton earned his Ph.D. at Harvard University and stayed on as an instructor (1958-60) and assistant professor (1960-65). "Salton was the last of Howard Aiken's Ph.D. students--and also one of the first programmers for the Harvard Mark IV computer," the press release said. He was interested in natural-language processing, especially information retrieval, and began the SMART information retrieval system in the 1960s (allegedly, SMART is known as "Salton's Magical Automatic Retriever of Text"), the release said.

In 1965, Salton helped create Cornell's Department of Computer Science, and he stayed at the university for the next 30 years.

His main research tool was the SMART information retrieval system, and "ideas in this work fundamentally changed full-text processing methods on computers and provided the field of information retrieval with solid underpinnings," the press release said.

Many well-known information retrieval concepts were introduced as a result of SMART, including the vector space model, sophisticated statistical term weighting schemes that distinguish concepts important for text representation from other more marginal concepts, and the relevance feedback technique for query optimization.

Salton was a prolific writer. He published five texts on information retrieval and more than 150 research articles in the field.

Salton's research earned him many awards. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1962 and became an Association for Computing Machinery Fellow in 1995. Two of his books and papers won ASIS awards. He won a prestigious German "Alexander Humboldt Senior Scientist Award" in 1988 and the ASIS Award of Merit in 1989.

In 1983, the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) created an Award for Outstanding Contributions. Salton received the first award, "marking him as the preeminent figure in the field," the press release said.

Over the years he served as editor-in-chief of ACM Communications and the ACM Journal. And when he died, he was an editor of the ACM Transactions on Database Systems.

Salton served on the ACM Council for seven years, "where his no-nonsense style and his adherence to principles made themselves felt," the press release said. He was active in SIGIR since its creation and served as its chair in 1979-83.

Salton also was chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Section T for several years and was on the Board of Directors of the American Society for Information Science.

"Gerry upheld the highest standards of scholarship for himself, his students and his colleagues," the press release said. "He was a nurturing, caring adviser. He supervised 20 Ph.D. students, who are now in industry and academia."

Contributions may be made to the Gerard Salton Distinguished Lectureship Series in Computer Science. Contact Marsha Pickens, Carpenter Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853.