Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones (26 August 1935 – 4 April 2007) was a self-taught programmer and a pioneering British computer and information scientist responsible for the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF), a technology that underlies most modern search engines. She was an advocate for women in computer science, her slogan being, "Computing is too important to be left to men." In 2019, The New York Times published her belated obituary in its series Overlooked, calling her "a pioneer of computer science for work combining statistics and linguistics, and an advocate for women in the field." From 2008, to recognise her achievements in the fields of information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP), the Karen Spärck Jones Award is awarded annually to a recipient for outstanding research in one or both of her fields. == Early life and education == Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones was born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England. Her parents were Alfred Owen Jones, a chemistry lecturer, and Ida Spärck, a Norwegian who worked for the Norwegian government while in exile in London during World War II. Spärck Jones was educated at a grammar school in Huddersfield and then from 1953 to 1956 at Girton College, Cambridge, studying history, with an additional final year in Moral Sciences (philosophy). While at Cambridge, Spärck Jones joined the organisation known as the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU) and met the head of CLRU Margaret Masterman, who would inspire her to go into computer science. While working at the CLRU, Spärck Jones began pursuing her PhD. At the time of submission, her PhD thesis was cast aside as uninspired and lacking original thought, but was later published in its entirety as a book. She briefly became a school teacher before moving into computer science. Spärck Jones married fellow Cambridge computer scientist Roger Needham in 1958. Spärck Jones's mother, Ida Spärck, had fled Norway on one of the last boats out after the German invasion in April 1940, going on to serve the Norwegian government in exile in London throughout the war. This background of displacement and resilience shaped the household in which Spärck Jones grew up. She later kept her mother's Norwegian surname professionally after marrying, stating that "it maintains a permanent existence of your own." Spärck Jones described her entry into computing as almost accidental. She had been working as a schoolteacher when she began visiting the CLRU out of curiosity about her husband's work. It was Margaret Masterman — whom she later described as "a very strange and interesting woman" — who offered her a research position and drew her fully into the field. == Career == Spärck Jones worked at the Cambridge Language Research Unit from the late 1950s, then at Cambridge University Computer Laboratory from 1974 until her retirement in 2002. From 1999, she held the post of Professor of Computers and Information. She had been given a permanent position only in 1993, and earlier in her career had been employed on a series of short-term contracts. She continued to work in the Computer Laboratory until shortly before her death. Her publications include nine books and numerous papers. A full list of her publications is available from the Cambridge Computer Laboratory. Spärck Jones' main research interests, since the late 1950s, were natural language processing and information retrieval. In 1964, Spärck Jones published "Synonymy and Semantic Classification", which is now seen as a foundational paper in the field of natural language processing. One of her most important contributions was the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF) weighting in information retrieval, which she introduced in a 1972 paper. IDF is used in most search engines today, usually as part of the term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF–IDF) weighting scheme. In the 1980s, Spärck Jones began her work on early speech recognition systems. In 1982 she became involved in the Alvey Programme which was an initiative to motivate more computer science research across the country. == Significance of inverse document frequency == At the time Spärck Jones was working, most computer scientists were focused on making people adapt to machines — learning precise codes and commands to retrieve information. Spärck Jones was working in the opposite direction: teaching computers to understand human language as it is actually used. Her 1972 paper introduced the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF) by observing that not all words carry equal informational value. A word like "the" appears in virtually every document and tells a retrieval system almost nothing about what any specific document is about. A rare word like "photosynthesis," by contrast, is highly specific and informative. IDF assigns each word a statistical weight based on how rarely it occurs across a document collection — the rarer the word, the higher its weight. When combined with term frequency (TF), which measures how often a word appears within a single document, the resulting TF–IDF score gives every word a relevance rating that can be used to rank documents in response to a search query. By 2007, Spärck Jones noted that "pretty much every web engine uses those principles." Her colleague John Tait remarked that "a lot of the stuff she was working on until five or ten years ago seemed like mad nonsense, and now we take it for granted." The 1972 paper remains among the most cited works in information retrieval research, with over 4,500 citations recorded in Google Scholar at the time of her death. The conceptual foundation of TF–IDF — that word meaning is statistical and contextual — has also informed later developments in machine learning and natural language processing, including transformer-based language models such as BERT. == Impact on artificial intelligence == Even though Spärck Jones' views on artificial intelligence (AI) were rather pessimistic in regard to the perceived limitations of AI in information retrieval, her work in natural language processing, information retrieval, and introducing the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF) contributed to the future technological development of AI. Her statistical and ranking methods shifted the direction of the development of AI towards being more expandable and led by data. Her work had a more indirect and conceptual impact on AI, compared to the current and direct impact it has had on search engines. == Gender and advocacy == Spärck Jones spent the majority of her career at Cambridge on short-term contracts without permanent employment, a situation she attributed directly to gender. In her 2001 IEEE oral history interview she stated that Cambridge was "in many ways not user-friendly, in the sense of women-friendly." She was frequently the only woman present in professional meetings throughout her career. She channelled this experience into active advocacy. She was a founding member of the women@cl network at Cambridge's Computer Laboratory, worked on outreach programmes aimed at encouraging girls into computing, and became widely known for her slogan: "Computing is too important to be left to men." She was the first woman ever to receive the BCS Lovelace Medal. === Honours and awards === These include: Gerard Salton Award (1988) Elected a Fellow of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 1993 President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 1994 Honorary degree of Doctor of Science from The City University in 1997. Elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), where she also served as Vice-President in 2000–2002 Fellow of European Association for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI) Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Award of Merit (2002) Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Lifetime Achievement Award (2004) ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award (2006) BCS Lovelace Medal (2007) Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Women's Group Athena Award (2007) == Death and legacy == Spärck Jones died on 4 April 2007, due to cancer at the age of 71. In 2008, the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG) in conjunction with the British Computer Society established an annual Karen Spärck Jones Award in her honour, to encourage and promote research that advances understanding of Natural Language Processing or Information Retrieval. The Karen Spärck Jones lecture sponsored by BCS recognises the contribution that women have made to computing. In August 2017, the University of Huddersfield renamed one of its campus buildings in her honour. Formerly known as Canalside West, the Spärck Jones building houses the University's School of Computing and Engineering. When Spärck Jones died in 2007, The Times did not publish an obituary for her, despite having published one for her husband Roger Needham in 2003. In 2019, The New York Times included her in its Overlooked series under the title "Ove
Pythia (machine learning)
Pythia is an ancient text restoration model that recovers missing characters from damaged text input using deep neural networks. It was created by Yannis Assael, Thea Sommerschield, and Jonathan Prag, researchers from Google DeepMind and the University of Oxford. To study the society and the history of ancient civilisations, ancient history relies on disciplines such as epigraphy, the study of ancient inscribed texts. Hundreds of thousands of these texts, known as inscriptions, have survived to our day, but are often damaged over the centuries. Illegible parts of the text must then be restored by specialists, called epigraphists, in order to extract meaningful information from the text and use it to expand our knowledge of the context in which the text was written. Pythia takes as input the damaged text, and is trained to return hypothesised restorations of ancient Greek inscriptions, working as an assistive aid for ancient historians. Its neural network architecture works at both the character- and word-level, thereby effectively handling long-term context information, and dealing efficiently with incomplete word representations. Pythia is applicable to any discipline dealing with ancient texts (philology, papyrology, codicology) and can work in any language (ancient or modern).
Open Mind Common Sense
Open Mind Common Sense (OMCS) is an artificial intelligence project based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab whose goal is to build and utilize a large commonsense knowledge base from the contributions of many thousands of people across the Web. It has been active from 1999 to 2016. Since its founding, it has accumulated more than a million English facts from over 15,000 contributors in addition to knowledge bases in other languages. Much of OMCS's software is built on three interconnected representations: the natural language corpus that people interact with directly, a semantic network built from this corpus called ConceptNet, and a matrix-based representation of ConceptNet called AnalogySpace that can infer new knowledge using dimensionality reduction. The knowledge collected by Open Mind Common Sense has enabled research projects at MIT and elsewhere. == History == The project was the brainchild of Marvin Minsky, Push Singh, Catherine Havasi, and others. Development work began in September 1999, and the project opened to the Internet a year later. Havasi described it in her dissertation as "an attempt to ... harness some of the distributed human computing power of the Internet, an idea which was then only in its early stages." The original OMCS was influenced by the website Everything2 and its predecessor, and presents a minimalist interface that is inspired by Google. Push Singh would have become a professor at the MIT Media Lab and lead the Common Sense Computing group in 2007, but committed suicide on February 28, 2006. The project is currently run by the Digital Intuition Group at the MIT Media Lab under Catherine Havasi. == Database and website == There are many different types of knowledge in OMCS. Some statements convey relationships between objects or events, expressed as simple phrases of natural language: some examples include "A coat is used for keeping warm", "The sun is very hot", and "The last thing you do when you cook dinner is wash your dishes". The database also contains information on the emotional content of situations, in such statements as "Spending time with friends causes happiness" and "Getting into a car wreck makes one angry". OMCS contains information on people's desires and goals, both large and small, such as "People want to be respected" and "People want good coffee". Originally, these statements could be entered into the Web site as unconstrained sentences of text, which had to be parsed later. The current version of the Web site collects knowledge only using more structured fill-in-the-blank templates. OMCS also makes use of data collected by the Game With a Purpose "Verbosity". In its native form, the OMCS database is simply a collection of these short sentences that convey some common knowledge. In order to use this knowledge computationally, it has to be transformed into a more structured representation. == ConceptNet == ConceptNet is a semantic network based on the information in the OMCS database. ConceptNet is expressed as a directed graph whose nodes are concepts, and whose edges are assertions of common sense about these concepts. Concepts represent sets of closely related natural language phrases, which could be noun phrases, verb phrases, adjective phrases, or clauses. ConceptNet is created from the natural-language assertions in OMCS by matching them against patterns using a shallow parser. Assertions are expressed as relations between two concepts, selected from a limited set of possible relations. The various relations represent common sentence patterns found in the OMCS corpus, and in particular, every "fill-in-the-blanks" template used on the knowledge-collection Web site is associated with a particular relation. The data structures that make up ConceptNet were significantly reorganized in 2007, and published as ConceptNet 3. The Software Agents group currently distributes a database and API for the new version 4.0. In 2010, OMCS co-founder and director Catherine Havasi, with Robyn Speer, Dennis Clark and Jason Alonso, created Luminoso, a text analytics software company that builds on ConceptNet. It uses ConceptNet as its primary lexical resource in order to help businesses make sense of and derive insight from vast amounts of qualitative data, including surveys, product reviews and social media. == Machine learning tools == The information in ConceptNet can be used as a basis for machine learning algorithms. One representation, called AnalogySpace, uses singular value decomposition to generalize and represent patterns in the knowledge in ConceptNet, in a way that can be used in AI applications. Its creators distribute a Python machine learning toolkit called Divisi for performing machine learning based on text corpora, structured knowledge bases such as ConceptNet, and combinations of the two. == Comparison to other projects == Other similar projects include Never-Ending Language Learning, Mindpixel (discontinued), Cyc, Learner, SenticNet, Freebase, YAGO, DBpedia, and Open Mind 1001 Questions, which have explored alternative approaches to collecting knowledge and providing incentive for participation. The Open Mind Common Sense project differs from Cyc because it has focused on representing the common sense knowledge it collected as English sentences, rather than using a formal logical structure. ConceptNet is described by one of its creators, Hugo Liu, as being structured more like WordNet than Cyc, due to its "emphasis on informal conceptual-connectedness over formal linguistic-rigor".
Emospark
EmoSpark is an artificial intelligence console created in London, United Kingdom by Patrick Levy-Rosenthal. The device uses facial recognition and language analysis to evaluate human emotion and convey responsive content according to the emotion. The console measures 90 mm x 90 mm x 90 mm and is cube shaped. It operates on an "Emotional Processing Unit", an emotion chip developed by Emoshape Inc. that enables the system to create emotional profile graphs of its surroundings. The emotional processing unit is a patent pending technology that is said to create synthesised emotional responses in machines. EmoSpark was funded through an Indiegogo campaign which aimed to raise $200,000. == Product overview == EmoSpark was created by French inventor Patrick Levy-Rosenthal, as an emotionally intelligent artificial life unit for the home that can interact with people. It is powered by Android and can communicate with users through typed input from a computer, tablet, smartphone or TV as well as through spoken commands. The EmoSpark's features are categorized into two types: functional and emotional. EmoSpark is said to have the ability to perform practical software-based tasks. Through the smartphone interface, it is able to gauge a person’s emotions and is reported to have a conversational library of over 2 million sentences. The face-tracking technology identifies users likes and dislikes to categorize their emotional responses to stimuli such as videos and music. The device has an emotional spectrum that is composed of eight emotions which are surprise, sadness, joy, trust, fear, disgust, anger and anticipation. EmoSpark monitors a person's facial expressions and emotions through images from an external camera, which are then processed through an emotion text analysis and content analysis. The New Scientist reported that EmoSpark had the ability to work on the best way to cheer up its users, emotionally. === Connectivity === EmoSpark is able to connect to Facebook and YouTube to present users with content designed to improve their mood, or to Wikipedia for collaborative knowledge that can be shared when users ask questions of it. Through Android OS, EmoSpark is able to be customized with Google Play store apps. The cube is expected to develop its own personality based on the communications it has had with the people using it. == EmoShape == The Emotion Chip (EPU) used in the cube is created by the US company Emoshape Inc, founded by Levy-Rosenthal. EmoShape Ltd (UK) was the company that developed EmoSpark cube. Patrick Levy-Rosenthal also received the IST Prize in 2005 from the European Council for Applied Science, Technology and Engineering.
Rohit Chadda
Rohit Chadda (born 26 August 1982) is an Indian investment banker and entrepreneur, who is the President & COO of Times Network. He leads the tech business portfolio and AI transformation of Times Group covering verticals like media tech, OTT, fintech, health tech, edu tech, ecommerce, gaming and sports. Previously, CEO of the digital business at Essel Group (Zee Entertainment, Zee Media and DNA), he was the co-founder of online food ordering platform Foodpanda. He is also the founder of omni-channel digital payments platform PayLo. He has been attributed for the turnaround of Zee Digital driving 4x growth in 2 years and bringing Zee's digital business to the second position on ComScore from ninth position making Zee the second largest digital media group in India. He has been featured among Top Tech CEOs of the decade (2010–2020) in India and was featured among Fortune 40 under 40 in 2015. == Education and early career == Chadda graduated from Delhi Technological University (formerly Delhi College of Engineering) with a degree in computer engineering and worked as a software engineer for Computer Sciences Corporation. In 2007 he joined Indian Institute of Management Calcutta to do his MBA after which he worked at Merrill Lynch as an investment banker in United Kingdom. He took an internal transfer to India in 2011. == Career == === Foodpanda === Chadda began his career in 2012 when he co-founded foodpanda. foodpanda expanded to around 40 countries before being bought by Delivery Hero. Before foodpanda got popular, he joked that he delivered pizza for a living. foodpanda had raised a total investment of over US$300 million till 2015. Chadda in the middle of 2015 stepped down from day-to-day responsibilities at Foodpanda to launch his digital payments startup. Foodpanda was acquired by its global competitor Delivery Hero in 2016. === Paylo === In 2015, he launched an omni-channel digital payments platform PayLo which acquired the in-restaurant payments app Ruplee in March 2016 for an undisclosed sum. PayLo was successful in the wake of demonetisation in India and expanded pan-India before being acquired by Immortal Technologies. Chadda believes that execution is more important than the idea to make a startup successful and the key challenge for experienced professionals to work in a startup environment is to unlearn what they have previously learned. PayLo acquired Ruplee before being itself acquired by Immortal Technologies. === Zee Group === Chadda took over as CEO of digital publishing of Zee Group in May 2019. Since 2017, he had led global product and strategy for Zee Group launching ZEE5, the flagship OTT of Zee Entertainment, across 170+ countries. Since June 2019, Zee Digital, the online arm of the Zee group, has registered the highest growth year-on-year among the top media publishers in India. Times Internet Limited, Network 18 Group, and India Today Group have grown by 45%, 21%, and 22% respectively from June 2020 over June 2019 while Zee Digital witnessed a growth of 123% over the same period. Zee Digital achieved its first milestone in September 2019 by crossing 100 million unique monthly visitors and was ranked 6th in the news and information category on ComScore India rankings at the time. Later in the month of March 2020 it crossed 150 million unique monthly visitors mark moving to 4th position. Further in May 2020 Zee Digital moved to 3rd position by crossing 185 million unique monthly visitors mark before finally ranking 2nd position in June 2020 in the ComScore rankings among all digital media groups in India. Chadda has led the transformation of the business of Zee Digital by scaling it to over 200 million users from 60 million users making it the second-largest digital media group in India. He attributes the growth from rank 9 to rank 2 in one year to the data and technology driven approach to content and the focus on vernacular languages. During his tenure, Zee Digital launched 8 new brand websites and 3 new languages to expand the product portfolio to 20 brands and 12 languages. During the US elections in November 2020, Zee Digital launched the English global news channel WION through a digital first approach across Asia Pacific, Middle East, UK and North America. Chadda launched Zee's UGC short video platform HiPi in the midst of the TikTok ban in India. Hipi was first launched within ZEE5 app ecosystem to capitalise on the reach of the OTT platform. After the success of the POC, he launched a standalone app for HiPi. HiPi is a short video platform that provides a complete video creation ecosystem along with news avenues of monetisation to content creators. He plans to use Zee's network reach of 600 million broadcast viewers and 300 million digital users to get creators on HiPi. HiPi launched India's first digital star hunt to allow users to audition for ZEE5 original shows through the short video platform. === Times Group === Chadda took over as President & COO of Times Network in September 2022. Leading the digital transformation of the group Chadda launched 11 new products in 18 months expanding the group's presence to various verticals in the tech business like fintech, health tech, edu tech, auto tech, OTT, ecommerce and gaming while extending the news vertical into business news, tech news and various vernacular languages. Within 4 months of his stint, in January 2023 he launched the digital platform for ET Now, targeting Gen Z, early jobbers and first time investors and laying the foundation for the fintech expansion for the brand. Since then, the product has expended to Hindi language targeting the larger Indian audience through the launch of ET Now Swadesh and further expanding to fintech business by launching ET Now Advisor, a distribution business focussing to upselling of cards, loans etc. to consumers by educating them and enabling them to make the right choices. ET Now reached 10 million users within the first 20 days of launch and became the No.1 business news channel on YouTube with 200 million views in April and May 2024. Expanding to health-tech, he launched AI powered daily health companion Health & Me in the presence of actor & fitness enthusiast Milind Soman. Chadda unveiled the auto-tech platform for Times Drive together with Union Minister of Road Transport and Highways, Nitin Gadkari showcasing the AI assisted platform that helps consumers make the right decisions when it comes to their automotive needs. In order to expand the group's presence into tech and gaming, Chadda acquired India's largest and most popular tech magazine Digit along with their digital platforms Digit.in and Skoar.gg in June 2024. Within a year, he was able to turnaround Digit's business with Digit.in becoming the No.1 Tech news platform in India in April 2025. Times Network launched college discovery platform unilist.in to enable students and parents search for the right course and institute for their higher education needs. With a focus on sports and gaming, Chadda launched India's first Inter-college esports championship under the brand of SKOAR College Gaming Championship. Times Network launched its OTT app Times Play under his leadership. The platform expanded its presence in the US through a partnership with Sling TV. He launched Pickleball Now which is the World's first TV channel focussed on the sport of Pickleball covering tournaments and leagues across the World. The channel has presence on TV and digital platforms and is being distributed to global markets through partnerships with BOTIM, Distro TV, Yupp TV and Rumble. In India, the channel is available on Jio TV, Jio TV+, Airtel Xtream Play, OTT Play, Dailyhunt. Times Group has launched India's Official Pickleball League affiliated with Indian Pickleball Association and Global Pickelball Federation which shall also be streamed live on Pickleball Now from 1st to 7th Dec 2025. === Investing and speaking === Chadda is a mentor at Esselerator, a Startup accelerator by Subhash Chandra Foundation. Esselerator is an initiative by Subhash Chandra, a billionaire Media baron, to promote and support tech entrepreneurs in domains like Media, Fintech and Education. Its powered by TiE Mumbai. Chadda is an angel investor in multiple technology startups like online school aggregator platform SchoolForSure.com. In 2019, he spoke at DPS to students on starting a business. At the time he remained CEO of Zee group's digital business division. == Philanthropy == Chadda organised a £1 mliion charity bike ride in aid of the British Asian Trust which saw participation by the Prince of Wales. Chadda presented the Prince of Wales with a cycling vest, which was said to be for his grandchildren. Chadda supports a non-profit organisation Mukkamaar founded by Bollywood actress Ishita Sharma that works towards fighting crime against women by teaching free self defence to young girls. He is helping the organisation launch their digital program through a WhatsApp-based chatbot. == A
Automated Mathematician
The Automated Mathematician (AM) is one of the earliest successful discovery systems. It was created by Douglas Lenat in Lisp, and in 1977 led to Lenat being awarded the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award. AM worked by generating and modifying short Lisp programs which were then interpreted as defining various mathematical concepts; for example, a program that tested equality between the length of two lists was considered to represent the concept of numerical equality, while a program that produced a list whose length was the product of the lengths of two other lists was interpreted as representing the concept of multiplication. The system had elaborate heuristics for choosing which programs to extend and modify, based on the experiences of working mathematicians in solving mathematical problems. == Controversy == Lenat claimed that the system was composed of hundreds of data structures called "concepts", together with hundreds of "heuristic rules" and a simple flow of control: "AM repeatedly selects the top task from the agenda and tries to carry it out. This is the whole control structure!" Yet the heuristic rules were not always represented as separate data structures; some had to be intertwined with the control flow logic. Some rules had preconditions that depended on the history, or otherwise could not be represented in the framework of the explicit rules. What's more, the published versions of the rules often involve vague terms that are not defined further, such as "If two expressions are structurally similar, ..." (Rule 218) or "... replace the value obtained by some other (very similar) value..." (Rule 129). Another source of information is the user, via Rule 2: "If the user has recently referred to X, then boost the priority of any tasks involving X." Thus, it appears quite possible that much of the real discovery work is buried in unexplained procedures. Lenat claimed that the system had rediscovered both Goldbach's conjecture and the fundamental theorem of arithmetic. Later critics accused Lenat of over-interpreting the output of AM. In his paper Why AM and Eurisko appear to work, Lenat conceded that any system that generated enough short Lisp programs would generate ones that could be interpreted by an external observer as representing equally sophisticated mathematical concepts. However, he argued that this property was in itself interesting—and that a promising direction for further research would be to look for other languages in which short random strings were likely to be useful. == Successor == This intuition was the basis of AM's successor Eurisko, which attempted to generalize the search for mathematical concepts to the search for useful heuristics.
Jan Leike
Jan Leike (born 1986 or 1987) is an AI alignment researcher who has worked at DeepMind and OpenAI. He joined Anthropic in May 2024. == Education == Jan Leike obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of Freiburg in Germany. After earning a master's degree in computer science, he pursued a PhD in machine learning at the Australian National University under the supervision of Marcus Hutter. == Career == Leike made a six-month postdoctoral fellowship at the Future of Humanity Institute before joining DeepMind to focus on empirical AI safety research, where he collaborated with Shane Legg. === OpenAI === In 2021, Leike joined OpenAI. In June 2023, he and Ilya Sutskever became the co-leaders of the newly introduced "superalignment" project, which aimed to determine how to align future artificial superintelligences within four years to ensure their safety. This project involved automating AI alignment research using relatively advanced AI systems. At the time, Sutskever was OpenAI's Chief Scientist, and Leike was the Head of Alignment. Leike was featured in Time's list of the 100 most influential personalities in AI, both in 2023 and in 2024. In May 2024, Leike announced his resignation from OpenAI, following the departure of Sutskever, Daniel Kokotajlo and several other AI safety employees from the company. Leike wrote that "Over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products", and that he "gradually lost trust" in OpenAI's leadership. In May 2024, Leike joined Anthropic, an AI company founded by former OpenAI employees.