For information - Roger Needham died last Friday.  In the 1960s
he published on clustering and classification.  Information
retrieval was among the areas he contributed to.  Among his
publications:
"Keywords and clumps", J. Documentation, 20, 5-15, 1964.
"Applications of the theory of clumps", Mechanical Translation, 8,
113-127, 1965.
"Automatic classification in linguistics", The Statistician,
17, 45-54, 1967.
"Automatic term classifications and retrieval", Information
Storage & Retrieval, 4, 91-100, 1968.

The following is from a short editorial I wrote for
The Computer Journal.

Fionn Murtagh


When, last summer, a meeting of editorial board members
of The Computer Journal was proposed for January 2003,
one of those planning to attend was Roger Needham.  His
participation was not to be.  Following a struggle with
cancer, Roger Needham passed away on 28 February 2003.

Roger was one of 'les grands' of computer science. His
work ranged over an incredibly wide swathe of computer
science. His early work at Cambridge in the 1950s included
cluster analysis and information retrieval.  In the 1960s, he
carried out pioneering work on computer architecture
and system software.  In the 1970s, his work involved
distributed computing.  In later decades, he devoted
considerable attention to security.

His many honours included Fellow of the Royal Society,
Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and CBE.
In 1997, Roger set up and became first director of Microsoft
Research in Cambridge.  He was in this position when he
died.  He is survived by his wife, Karen Sparck Jones.

Fionn Murtagh
Editor-in-Chief






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