In early February, FOSDEM (Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting) happened in Brussels, as it does every year, since 2000 as OSDEM and from 2001 as FOSDEM, (at the request of Richard Stallman). Focussing on free and open-source software development and the F(L)OSS movement in general, FOSDEM enables developers to meet up and present their latest applications of free and open-source software. Saturday, the first day of the conference, I attended the keynote lecture by Laura Durieux entitled ‘Where have the women of tech history gone?’, which provided a rich overview of frequently overlooked or forgotten contributions by women to the history of technology. (https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2850-where-have-the-women-of-tech-history-gone-/) As most now realise, Ada Lovelace is considered the first programmer and importantly for the field of search, in the 1970s Karen Spärck Jones focused on NLP and information retrieval, developing TF-IDF (term document frequency), the relevance of specific keyword in the text that is used by most search engines (and SEO).
