We invite you to post your tributes to Chris Paice.
6 thoughts on “Tributes and Memories”
Very sad news about Chris. He was old school in the very best sense of the term. Chris was a master of the lost art of using the blackboard and he showed why chalk-and-talk needn’t be a pejorative term.
As a student, I occasionally felt anxious for him. Chris had the curious habit of seeming to hold his breath while writing. The end of every line of hand-written material on the blackboard (which might be three metres long) would be punctuated by a sharp gasp for breath.
He was courteous and kind to students and colleagues, rigorous in his work and (of course) greatly undervalued by the University.
Chris was a stalwart of the Department — originally called Computer Studies, then expanded and renamed as Computing in the mid 1980s. He was a pioneer in aspects of Information Retrieval, one of the formative and enduring topics in our discipline. Chris was modest, unassuming and a wonderful colleague. And he was certainly valued by successive Heads of Department as a superb and trustworthy academic, whether in teaching, research, or in his administrative duties.
It was a great pleasure being in meetings with Chris, as he was invariably helpful to the proceedings at hand, not least in discussions with students. I very much enjoyed Chris’ company, his sense of humour, and his generosity of spirit: I’ll miss him.
Back in ‘late 84 Chris employed me as an RA to work on automatic abstraction. Why he picked a Physics & Computing grad with a 1970s understanding of grammar (none) I’m not quite sure but for the next few years I spent inordinate amounts of time working on the stemmer and trying to analyse the behaviour of “the” & “it” for him.
He was generous with his time, ideas and credit. I returned from Xmas vacation to find my name on a paper about “it” for which I had spent the time programming and generally having fun and he wrote the paper.
My favourite title of a paper: “What it is and isn’t”, still makes me smile. One of the first things Chris had me read when I started my research.
I have lots of fond memories of working in the back waters of Information Retrieval with Chris from 1990-1993. His patience, kindness, encouragement and warmth allowed this ignorant student to develop ideas in a safe environment, with his intellectual support always providing a sensible steer.
I still tell my younger colleagues about Chris’ ability to read punched tape to demonstrate the speed of change they will have to deal with in their lives.
A real gentleman.
Chris and Kathy were great hosts – a trip to dinner at Quernmore Road was a treat. An even greater treat was talking to Chris and working with him. We edited a book together a long time ago, and he showed me how to pull an edited collection together, deftly and kindly. I have used what I learned from him many times since. Rest in peace Chris.
Very sad news about Chris. He was old school in the very best sense of the term. Chris was a master of the lost art of using the blackboard and he showed why chalk-and-talk needn’t be a pejorative term.
As a student, I occasionally felt anxious for him. Chris had the curious habit of seeming to hold his breath while writing. The end of every line of hand-written material on the blackboard (which might be three metres long) would be punctuated by a sharp gasp for breath.
He was courteous and kind to students and colleagues, rigorous in his work and (of course) greatly undervalued by the University.
Chris was a stalwart of the Department — originally called Computer Studies, then expanded and renamed as Computing in the mid 1980s. He was a pioneer in aspects of Information Retrieval, one of the formative and enduring topics in our discipline. Chris was modest, unassuming and a wonderful colleague. And he was certainly valued by successive Heads of Department as a superb and trustworthy academic, whether in teaching, research, or in his administrative duties.
It was a great pleasure being in meetings with Chris, as he was invariably helpful to the proceedings at hand, not least in discussions with students. I very much enjoyed Chris’ company, his sense of humour, and his generosity of spirit: I’ll miss him.
Back in ‘late 84 Chris employed me as an RA to work on automatic abstraction. Why he picked a Physics & Computing grad with a 1970s understanding of grammar (none) I’m not quite sure but for the next few years I spent inordinate amounts of time working on the stemmer and trying to analyse the behaviour of “the” & “it” for him.
He was generous with his time, ideas and credit. I returned from Xmas vacation to find my name on a paper about “it” for which I had spent the time programming and generally having fun and he wrote the paper.
My favourite title of a paper: “What it is and isn’t”, still makes me smile. One of the first things Chris had me read when I started my research.
I have lots of fond memories of working in the back waters of Information Retrieval with Chris from 1990-1993. His patience, kindness, encouragement and warmth allowed this ignorant student to develop ideas in a safe environment, with his intellectual support always providing a sensible steer.
I still tell my younger colleagues about Chris’ ability to read punched tape to demonstrate the speed of change they will have to deal with in their lives.
A real gentleman.
Chris and Kathy were great hosts – a trip to dinner at Quernmore Road was a treat. An even greater treat was talking to Chris and working with him. We edited a book together a long time ago, and he showed me how to pull an edited collection together, deftly and kindly. I have used what I learned from him many times since. Rest in peace Chris.