Gerard Salton

Gerard Salton (1927-1995) was a German-American computer scientist and information retrieval specialist.

Life

Gerard A. "Gerry" Salton was born om March 8, 1927 in Nuremberg, Germany and named Gerhard Anton Sahlmann. He came to the United States in 1947 and was naturalized in 1952. He received a Bachelor's (1950) and Master's (1952) degree in mathematics from Brooklyn College, and a Ph.D. from Harvard in applied mathematics in 1958 and taught there until 1965, when he joined Cornell University and co-founded its department of Computer Science. He died on August 28, 1995 in Ithaca, NY.

Contributions

His group at Cornell developed the SMART Information Retrieval System, which he initiated when he was at Harvard. It was the first system to use the now popular vector space model for information retrieval. Salton developed SMART (System for the Mechanical Analysis and Retrieval of Text). From his evaluations/tests of SMART, he formulated general rules for automatic language processing (Bellardo & Bourne). According to Bellardo and Bourne, Salton's retrieval experiments of the 1980's "greatly contributed to the knowledge base of computerized information indexing, storage and retrieval." He advocated system design at the 1965 ADI conference. He was one of the first programmers for the Harvard Mark IV computer and one of the founders of the Cornell University Computer Science Dept. Editor-in-chief, ACM Transactions and ACM Journal Salton was editor-in-chief of the Communications of the ACM and the Journal of the ACM, and chaired Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR). He was an associate editor of the ACM Transactions on Information Systems.

Publications

• Automatic Information Organization and Retrieval. 1968.
• A Theory of Indexing. Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. p. 56. ISBN 9780898710151. 1975.
• Introduction to modern Information Retrieval. With Michael J. McGill. 1983. ISBN 0-07-054484-0
• Automatic Text Processing. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. 1989. 530. ISBN 978-0-201-12227-5.
• "A Vector Space Model for Automatic Indexing," With A. Wong & C. S. Yang. Communications of the ACM 18, no. 11 (1975): 613–620.
• "Toward a dynamic library." In: F. Wilfrid Lancaster, ed. The Role of the Library in an Electronic Society: Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing. Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Graduate School of Library Science, 1980.

Offices

• American Society for Information Science. Board of Directors, late 1980s.
• Association of Computing Machinery. Council.

Awards

• 1970 Best JASIS Paper Award
• 1975 Outstanding Information Science Book (ASIS)
• 1988 Alexander Humboldt Senior Scientist Award
• 1989 Award of Merit (ASIS)

He was an ACM Fellow (elected 1995),[7] received the Award of Merit from the American Society for Information Science (1989), and was the first recipient of the SIGIR Award for outstanding contributions to study of Information Retrieval (1983) -- now called the Gerard Salton Award.

Further reading

• "Gerard Salton." Wikipedia [1]
• Dubin, David. "The Most Influential Paper Gerard Salton Never Wrote." Library Trends 52, no 4 (Spring 2004): 748–764. [2] Revisionist history of the vector space model and Salton's work.

Papers

• Cornell University Library. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections: 16-13-2908. Gerard Salton papers. [3]