Gerry Salton, professor and co-founder of the department of Computer Science at Cornell, developed the SMART information retrieval system in the early 1960s, which is the precursor to modern search engines. Salton was perhaps the leading computer scientist working in the field of information retrieval during his time, and “the father of information retrieval”. His group at Cornell developed the SMART Information Retrieval System, which he initiated when he was at Harvard