Donna Harman graduated from Cornell University as an Electrical Engineer, and started her career working with Professor Gerard Salton in the design and building of several test collections, including the first MEDLARS one. Later work was concerned with searching large volumes of data on relatively small computers, starting with building the IRX system at the National Library of Medicine in 1987, and then the Citator/PRISE system at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 1988. In 1990 she was asked by DARPA to put together a realistic test collection on the order of 2 gigabytes of text, and this test collection was used in the first Text REtrieval Conference (TREC). TREC is now in its 20th year, and along with its sister evaluations such as CLEF,NTCIR,INEX,and FIRE,serves as a major testing ground for information retrieval algorithms. She received the 1999 Strix Award from the U.K Institute of Information Scientists for this effort. Starting in 2000 she worked withPaul Over at NIST to form a new effort (DUC) to evaluate text summarization, which has now been folded into the Text Analysis Conference (TAC), providing evaluation for several areas in NLP.
