Gerard Salton

Name: Gerard (Gerry) Salton

Born: March 8, 1927, in Nuremberg, Germany

Death: August 28, 1995 (Age: 68)

Computer-related contributions

• Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University who was possibly the leading computer scientist working in the field of information retrieval during his time.
• His group at Cornell developed the SMART Information Retrieval System, which he initiated when he was at Harvard.
• Salton was best known for developing the now widely used Vector Space Model for information retrieval.

Significant publications

• A Vector Space Model for Automatic Indexing (1975).
• Automatic Text Processing (1989).
• A Theory of Indexing. Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (1975).
• Automatic Information Organization and Retrieval (1968).

Honors and awards

• ACM Fellow (1995).
• Award of Merit from the American Society for Information Science (1989).
• SIGIR Award for outstanding contributions to study of information retrieval (1983).