Stephen Robertson (computer scientist)

Stephen Robertson is a British computer scientist. He is known for his work on information retrieval[1] and the Okapi BM25 weighting model.[2][3]

Stephen Robertson
Born	6 April 1946
Nationality	British
Alma mater	Cambridge, City University, University College London
Known for	Work on information retrieval and inverse document frequency
Awards	Gerard Salton Award (2000), Tony Kent Strix award (1998), ACM Fellow (2013)
Scientific career
Fields	Computer science
Doctoral advisor	B.C (Bertie) Brookes
Website	staff.city.ac.uk/~sbrp622

After completing his undergraduate degree in mathematics at Cambridge University, he took an MS at City University, and then worked for ASLIB. He then studied for his PhD at University College London under the renowned statistician and scholar B. C. Brookes. He then returned to City University working there from 1978 until 1998 in the Department of Information Science, continuing as a part-time professor and subsequently as professor emeritus. He is also a fellow of Girton College, Cambridge University. Now retired, Robertson is Professor Emeritus at City University, and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Computer Science at UCL.[4] The Stephen Robertson prize for the best dissertation in the UCL MA/MSc in Digital Humanities is named after him.[4] He also writes poetry, and has written a book about the origins of information technology (see below).

From 1998 to 2013 he worked in the Cambridge laboratory of Microsoft Research, where he led a group investigating core search processes such as term weighting, document scoring and ranking algorithms, combining evidence from different sources, and metrics and methods for the evaluation and optimisation of search. Much of his work has contributed to the Microsoft search engine Bing. He participated a number of times in the TREC conference.

References

1. Robertson, S. E.; Spärck Jones, K. (1976). "Relevance weighting of search terms". Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 27 (3): 129. doi:10.1002/asi.4630270302.
2. Spärck Jones, K.; Walker, S.; Robertson, S. E. (2000). "A probabilistic model of information retrieval: Development and comparative experiments: Part 1". Information Processing & Management. 36 (6): 779–808. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.134.6108. doi:10.1016/S0306-4573(00)00015-7.
3. Spärck Jones, K.; Walker, S.; Robertson, S. E. (2000). "A probabilistic model of information retrieval: Development and comparative experiments: Part 2". Information Processing & Management. 36 (6): 809–840. doi:10.1016/S0306-4573(00)00016-9.
4. "The Stephen Robertson Prize | UCL UCL Centre for Digital Humanities".

External links

• Robertson, Stephen; Zaragoza, Hugo (2009). The Probabilistic Relevance Framework: BM25 and Beyond (PDF). NOW Publishers, Inc. ISBN 978-1-60198-308-4.

• Robertson, Stephen (2020). B C, Before Computers. Open Book Publishers. doi:10.11647/OBP.0225.