Gerard Salton

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
by Steven Levy
Published 12 Apr 2011

When DEC opened it to outsiders on December 15, 1995, nearly 300,000 people tried it out. They were dazzled. AltaVista’s actual search quality techniques—what determined the ranking of results—were based on traditional information retrieval (IR) algorithms. Many of those algorithms arose from the work of one man, a refugee from Nazi Germany named Gerard Salton, who had come to America, got a PhD at Harvard, and moved to Cornell University, where he cofounded its computer science department. Searching through databases using the same commands you’d use with a human—“natural language” became the term of art—was Salton’s specialty. During the 1960s, Salton developed a system that was to become a model for information retrieval.

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Born in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, in the foothills of the Himalayas, Singhal had arrived in the United States in 1992 to pursue a master’s degree in computer science at the University of Minnesota. He’d become fascinated with the field then known as information retrieval and was desperate to study with its pioneering innovator, Gerard Salton. “I only applied to one grad school, and it was Cornell,” he says. “And I wrote in my statement of purpose that if I was ever going to get a PhD, it’s with Gerry Salton. Otherwise, I didn’t think a PhD was worth it.” He became Salton’s assistant, got his PhD at Cornell, and eventually wound up at AT&T Labs.

Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World
by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg
Published 15 Nov 2010

[352] Bryce Ryan and Neal C. Gross. The diffusion of hybrid seed corn in two Iowa communities. Rural Sociology, 8:15–24, 1943. [353] Matthew Salganik, Peter Dodds, and Duncan Watts. Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural market. Science, 311:854–856, 2006. [354] Gerard Salton and M.J. McGill. Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval. McGraw-Hill, 1983. [355] Oskar Sandberg. Neighbor selection and hitting probability in small-world graphs. Annals of Applied Probability, 18(5):1771–1793, 2008. [356] Alvaro Sandroni. Do markets favor agents able to make accurate predictions?

The Art of Computer Programming: Fundamental Algorithms
by Donald E. Knuth
Published 1 Jan 1974