Skip to Navigation
University of Pittsburgh
Print This Page Print this pages

November 25, 1998

Robert R. Korfhage

Robert R. Korfhage, professor emeritus in the School of Information Sciences, died at his home in Squirrel Hill on Nov. 20, 1998.

He retired from the University in May 1998 after a long and distinguished research career in the area of information retrieval and related topics.

Holding bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in mathematics from the University of Michigan, Korfhage spent more than 35 years on university faculties including Purdue (1962-70), Southern Methodist University (1970-87), and Pitt (1987-98). He also served as a visiting professor at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and the Universities of Western Ontario, Alberta, and Texas at Dallas and Williams College.

Selected twice as a Fulbright-Hays Lecturer, Korfhage also traveled professionally in Europe, Morocco, Japan and China. His connections with international scholars developed into a fruitful relationship for the School of Information Sciences (SIS) and Molde College and Hedmark College in Norway. The agreement that resulted has enabled the universities to exchange faculty and students on a regular basis.

Among his fields of interest were information storage and retrieval, full text and image databases, natural language systems, visual languages, human-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, data structures, chromatic polynomials, hypergraphs, information networks, sparse matrices and computer-assisted instruction.

His most recent research was supported by the Information, Robotics and Intelligent Systems section of the National Science Foundation. Korfhage authored 10 books, including "Information Storage and Retrieval,"which received the 1997 Association of American Publishers award for outstanding professional, reference or scholarly textbook in the category for outstanding computer science textbooks. The book also won the 1998 American Society of Information Science award for the best information science book.

He authored or co-authored more than 70 published papers. Through his research, he helped to clarify fundamental issues surrounding the nature of document spaces and user information needs.

He held memberships and was active in Sigma Xi, Upsilon Pi Epsilon, the Association for Computing Machinery, the IEEE Computer Society and the American Society for Information Science, and he was a consultant to more than a dozen organizations. SIS Dean Toni Carbo said, "He was an extraordinary teacher and mentor to students and junior faculty."Stephen Hirtle, Department of Information Science and Telecommunications chair, added: "Dr. Korfhage was a strong mentor and his office constantly had a line of students, whom he would engage for hours in intellectual discussions. He guided the department for many years with this academic rigor, belief in doing what is right, and a wonderful sense of humor. He will be missed by all."Earlier this year the school established the "Robert R. Korfhage Award for Excellence in Information Retrieval"to encourage collaborative research between faculty and students, as exemplified by Korfhage's work. An award of $500 will be given annually to the best scholarly paper on information retrieval or a related topic, co-authored by at least one student and no more than one faculty member and worthy of publication in a refereed journal.

The faculty has asked that memorial contributions be made to support this award.

Filed under: Feature,Volume 31 Issue 7

Leave a Reply