In Memoriam

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Joseph Weizenbaum

1923 - 2008
Professor emeritus of computer science at MIT who grew skeptical of artificial intelligence after creating a program that made many users feel like they were speaking with an empathic psychologist, died March 5 in Berlin. He was 85.
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George Glaser

1931 - 2006
In 1961 he joined McKinsey and Company, Inc., in San Francisco as a consultant, and he became a principal in 1967. He was noted for his service to the information technology profession as a whole, through his leadership, enthusiastic support, and tireless work for its associations and foundations. He was president of the board of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS) and chairman of the National Computer Conference (NCC) board from 1973 to 1975. He was president and member of the board of directors of the Charles Babbage Foundation. George was treasurer of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 1968-1972, and council member-at-large, 1973-1975. He was a member of the Data Processing Management Association's (DPMA) Education Foundation Board of Regents from its founding in 1975 to 1977. He also was a Governor of the International Council for Computer Communication, 1998-2005. He was one of the earliest members of the Churchill Club, Silicon Valley’s business and technology forum, and served four full terms on the Club’s Board of Directors beginning in 1995 leading to Board Emeritus status.
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Joshua Lederberg

1925 - 2008
He was an American molecular biologist known for his work in genetics, artificial intelligence, and space exploration. He was just 33 years old when he won the 1958 Nobel for Physiology or Medicine for discovering that bacteria can mate and exchange genes. He shared the prize with Edward L. Tatum and George Beadle who won for their work with genetics. In addition to his contributions to biology, Lederberg did extensive research in artificial intelligence. This included work in the NASA experimental programs seeking life on Mars and the chemistry expert system Dendral.
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Bernard Galler

1928 - 2006
Dr. Galler was an American mathematician and computer scientist at the University of Michigan who was involved in the development of large-scale operating systems and computer languages including the MAD programming language and the Michigan Terminal System operating system.[1] He attended the University of Chicago where he earned a B.Sc. in mathematics at the University of Chicago (1947), followed by a M.Sc. from UCLA and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1955), advised by Paul Halmos and Marshall Stone. He joined the mathematics department at the University of Michigan (1955) where he taught the first programming course (1956) using an IBM 704. Galler helped to develop the computer language called the Michigan Algorithm Decoder (1959-) in use at several universities. He formed the Communication Sciences dept (1965), renamed Computer Sciences (CS), which became the Computer and Communications (CCS) dept (1984), and Computer Science Department in the 70s, from which he retired in 1994. His class developed the realtime course scheduling program called Computer Registration Involving Student Participation (CRISP) which allowed students to register for courses without waiting in long lines. The University used the CRISP application for over fifteen years. From 1968 to 1970, Prof. Galler was the President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. He was the founding editor of the journal IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (1979-87). He was also the President of the Software Patent Institute (1992). For fifteen years, he served as an expert witness in numerous important legal cases around the country involving computer software issues. He was a trustee and director of the Charles Babbage Foundation. He was married to Enid Harris, played violin in several orchestras and chamber groups, co-founded the Ypsilanti Youth Orchestra (2001) for children whose schools did not have string music education. He was president of the Orchestra Board at his university, where he also partook in the Ann Arbor chapter of Rotary International. He died from pulmonary embolism.[2]
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John Adam Presper Eckert, Jr.

1919 - 1995
He was an American electrical engineer and computer pioneer. With John Mauchly he invented the first general-purpose electronic digital computer (ENIAC), presented the first course in computing topics (the Moore School Lectures), founded the first commercial computer company (the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation), and designed the first commercial computer in the U.S., the UNIVAC, which incorporated Eckert's invention of the mercury delay line memory.
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Bill Charles Norris

1911 - 2006
He was the pioneering CEO of Control Data Corporation, at one time one of the most powerful and respected computer companies in the world. He is famous for taking on IBM in a head-on fight and winning, as well as being a social activist who used Control Data's expansion in the late 1960s to bring jobs and training to inner-cities and disadvantaged communities. Norris entered the computer business just after World War II, when his team of US Navy cryptographers formed Engineering Research Associates to build scientific computers. ERA was fairly successful in these early days, but in the early 1950s a lengthy series of government probes into "Navy funding" drained the company and they sold out to Remington Rand. They operated within Remington Rand as a separate division for a time, but during the later merger with Sperry Corporation that formed Sperry Rand, their division was merged with UNIVAC. This resulted in most of ERA's work being dropped, and a number of employees decamped and set up Control Data, unanimously selecting Norris as president. Control Data started by selling magnetic drum memory systems to other computer manufacturers, but introduced their own mainframe, the CDC 1604, in 1958. Designed primarily by Seymour Cray, the company soon followed it with a series of increasingly powerful machines. In 1965 they introduced the CDC 6600, the first supercomputer, and CDC was suddenly in the leadership position with a machine ten times as fast as anything else on the market.
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Jack St. Clair Kilby

1923 - 2005
He was a Nobel Prize laureate in physics in 2000 for his invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 while working at Texas Instruments (TI). He is also the inventor of the handheld calculator and thermal printer.
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Enid Mumford

1924 - 2006
Early in her career Enid Mumford realised that the implementation of large computer systems generally resulted in failure to produce a satisfactory outcome. Such failure could arise even when the underlying technology was adequate. She demonstrated that the underlying cause was an inability to overcome human factors associated with the implementation and use of computers. Four decades later, despite the identification of these sociotechnical factors and the development of methodologies to overcome such problems, large scale computer implementations are often unsuccessful in practice. Following her BA in Social Science from Liverpool University, Enid Mumford spent time working in industry, first as personnel manager for an aircraft factory and later as production manager for an alarm clock manufacturer. The first job was important for her career as an academic, since it involved looking after personnel policy and industrial relations strategy for a large number of women staff. The second job also proved invaluable, as she was running a production department, providing a level of practical experience that is unusual among academics. Professor Mumford then joined the Faculty of Social Science at Liverpool University, where she carried out research in industrial relations in the Liverpool docks and in the North West coal industry. In order to collect information for the dock research, she became a canteen assistant in the canteens used by the stevedores for meals. Each canteen was in a different part of the waterfront estate and served dockers working on different shipping lines and with different cargoes. The coal mine research required her to spend many months underground talking to miners at the coal face. She then spent a year at the University of Michigan, where she worked for the University Bureau of Public Health Economics and studied Michigan medical facilities while her husband took a higher degree in dental science. On returning to England, she joined the newly formed Manchester Business School (MBS), where she undertook many research contracts investigating the human and organisational impacts of computer based systems. During this time she became Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Director of the Computer and Work Design Research Unit (CAWDRU). She also directed the MBA programme for four years. While at MBS, Professor Mumford developed a close relationship with the Tavistock Institute and became interested in their democratic socio-technical approach to work organisation. Since then, she has applied this approach to the design and implementation of computer-based systems and information technology. One of her largest socio-technical projects was with the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in Boston. In the 1970's she became a member of the International Quality of Working Life Group, the goal of which was to spread the socio-technical message around the world. She later became a council member of the Tavistock Institute and was also a member of the US Socio-technical Round Table.
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Colin Tully

1936 - 2007
As a member of the LEO team in the UK he helped develop on of the earlier time sharing ooperating system for the LEO III computers some time before OS 360 was launched. In his later career he made a number of important contributions to Software Engineering practices.
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Richard Stevens

1951 - 1999
Richard Stevens was born in 1951 in Luanshya, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). His father worked there for the copper industry. The family moved to Salt Lake City, Hurley, New Mexico, Washington, D.C. and Phalaborwa, South Africa. Stevens attended Fishburne Military School in Waynesboro, Virginia. In 1973, he received a B.SC. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan and in 1978 an M.S. and in 1982 a Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the University of Arizona. He moved to Tucson in 1975 where he was employed at Kitt Peak National Observatory as a computer programmer until 1982. From 1982 until 1990 he was Vice President of Computing Services at Health Systems International in New Haven, CT. Stevens moved back to Tucson in 1990 where he pursued his career as an author and consultant. He was also an avid pilot and a part-time flight instructor during the 1970s. Stevens died in 1999, at the age of 48. In 2000, he was posthumously awarded the Usenix Lifetime Achievement Award.
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Arthur Walter Burks

1913 - 2008
He was an American mathematician who in the 1940s as a senior engineer on the project contributed to the design of the ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. Decades later, Burks and his wife Alice Burks outlined their case for the subject matter of the ENIAC having been derived from John Vincent Atanasoff.
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David Tresman Caminer

1915 - 2008
David took a leading role in bringing the LEO computer into active use for the UK catering enterprise J. Lyons and Company. He was responsible for developing the business applications and as such in charge of all programming and systems work. When Lyons set up its computer subsidiary, LEO Computers Limited, he became a director responsible for marketing, and all systems work. Subsequently on the Government sponsored consolidation of the UK computer manufacturers he took a senior role in the resultant company, ICL. David was a true pioneer, inventing many of the standards now called systems engineering (Aris, 2000, Caminer 2003). Many of those who worked for him owe their success to the rigorous methods and quality standards David insisted on. After retirement David established the LEO Foundation and was the principal author of the book "LEO: The Incredible Story of the World's First Business Computer" (Caminer et al, 1998)
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Ralph J. Slutz

1917 - 2005
Ralph J. Slutz, 88, a physicist and computer pioneer who made critical contributions in two milestones of the human computing history, passed away on November 16, 2005, at Boulder Community Hospital, Colorado, USA. Dr. Slutz was among the first four principal engineers working with John von Neumann to build a computer with a central memory to store and modify data and instructions (the well-known Electronic Computer Project, also called the IAS computer) at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton University (1946-1948). He later became the chief architect working with Samuel N. Alexander, Director of the Electronic Computer Laboratory of the National Bureau of Standards (the NIST now), to build the SEAC computer, which was the first computer with an internally stored program in the US government, and the first operational machine of this kind in the US (1948-1950).
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Randy Pausch

1960 - 2008
Randy Pausch was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and grew up in Columbia, Maryland. After graduating from Oakland Mills High School in Columbia, Pausch received his bachelor's degree in computer science from Brown University in May 1982 and his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in August 1988. While completing his doctoral studies, Pausch was briefly employed at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and Adobe Systems. Pausch was an assistant and associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia's School of Engineering and Applied Science from 1988 until 1997. While there, he completed sabbaticals at Walt Disney Imagineering and Electronic Arts (EA). In 1997, Pausch became Associate Professor of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, and Design, at Carnegie Mellon University. He was a co-founder in 1998, along with Don Marinelli, of CMU's Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), and he started the Building Virtual Worlds course at CMU and taught it for 10 years. He was a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow. He consulted with Google on user interface design and also consulted with PARC, Imagineering, and Media Metrix. Pausch was the author or co-author of five books and over 70 articles and the founder of the Alice software project. Pausch received two awards from ACM in 2007 for his achievements in computing education. These are the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award and the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education. He was also inducted as a Fellow of the ACM in 2007. The Pittsburgh City Council declared November 19, 2007 to be "Dr. Randy Pausch Day." In May 2008, Pausch was listed by Time as one of the World's Top-100 Most Influential People.
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Michael Sean Mahoney

1939 - 2008
Michael Mahoney earned his Ph.D. from Princeton and then dedicated his 40-year academic career in the history of science to the University as professor of history. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University, Mahoney came to Princeton in 1962 after studying for two years at the University of Munich as a German Foreign Exchange Service Fellow. While working on his doctorate in history and in history of science at Princeton, he served as an instructor and was appointed an assistant professor upon the completion of his degree in 1967. Mahoney divided his research and teaching between the development of the mathematical sciences from antiquity to 1700 and the recent history of computing and information technology. He was the author of "The Mathematical Career of Pierre de Fermat, 1601-1665"; a series of monographs on the mathematics of René Descartes, Isaac Barrow, Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton; and dozens of articles on the development of computer science and software engineering as new technical disciplines. Mahoney taught classes on topics ranging from "The Origins of Modern Science, 1500 to 1700," to "Creating the Computer: From ENIAC to the Internet," a freshman seminar he led last fall. He also advised many doctoral dissertations, conducted numerous alumni education programs and taught in the Teachers as Scholars Program, which provides professional development opportunities for area school teachers. In 1979, he set out to design a course on the history of technology. As part of that effort, he decided he needed to learn more about computing and signed up for courses in Princeton's School of Engineering and Applied Science, essentially completing the undergraduate curriculum in computer science. Under a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in the late 1980s, Mahoney worked with three other faculty members to develop engineering curriculum materials for liberal arts students. They brought 20 faculty members from liberal arts institutions to campus during the summer to learn about the materials and how to incorporate them into instruction. In 1984 and 1985, Mahoney served as director of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for Secondary School Teachers on campus focused on "Technology and the Human Experience." In an interview on the history department website, Mahoney explained his fascination with the human side of the technological revolution. For example, he cited software glitches with the baggage-handling system that caused the 16-month delay in opening the new Denver airport in the 1990s.
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Jim Gray

1944 - 2007
Gray studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his B.S. in Engineering Mathematics (Math and Statistics) in 1966 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1969. He was the first recipient of a Ph.D. from Berkeley's Computer Science Department. Gray pursued his career primarily working as a researcher and software designer at a number of industrial companies, including IBM, Tandem Computers, and DEC. He was a Technical Fellow for Microsoft Research in San Francisco, beginning in 1995. Gray contributed to several major database and transaction processing systems, including the System R while at IBM, TerraServer-USA and Skyserver for Microsoft. Among his best known achievements are granular database locking, two-tier transaction commit semantics, and the data cube operator for data warehousing applications. He also helped in the development of Virtual Earth.
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Donald Davies

1927 - 2000
Mr. Davies was a Welsh computer scientist who was a co-inventor of packet switching (and originator of the term), along with Paul Baran in the US. Davies was born in Treorchy in the Rhondda Valley, Wales. He received BSc degrees in physics (1943) and mathematics (1947) at Imperial College London. In 1955, he married Diane Burton. From 1947, he worked with Alan Turing on the Pilot ACE computer and indeed spotted mistakes in Turing's seminal 1936 paper On Computable Numbers, much to Turing's annoyance. These were perhaps some of the first "programming" errors in existence, even if they were for a theoretical computer, the universal Turing machine. From 1966 he headed the Autonomic Division of the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington just outside London. He first presented his ideas on packet switching at a conference in Edinburgh on 5 August 1968.[1] In 1970, Davies helped build a packet switched network called the Mark I to serve the NPL in the UK. It was replaced with the Mark II in 1973, and remained in operation until 1986, influencing other research in the UK and Europe. [1] He worked on computer network security from the late 1970s. Davies was appointed a CBE in 1983 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1987.
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Oliver Selfridge

1926 - 2008
Oliver G. Selfridge, an innovator in early computer science and artificial intelligence. Credited with coining the term “intelligent agents,” for software programs capable of observing and responding to changes in their environment, Mr. Selfridge theorized about far more, including devices that would not only automate certain tasks but also learn through practice how to perform them better, faster and more cheaply. Eventually, he said, machines would be able to analyze operator instructions to discern not just what users requested but what they actually wanted to occur, not always the same thing. His 1958 paper “Pandemonium: A Paradigm for Learning,” which proposed a collection of small components dubbed “demons” that together would allow machines to recognize patterns, was a landmark contribution to the emerging science of machine learning. An early enthusiast about the potential of interactive computing, Mr. Selfridge saw his ideas summarized in a famous 1968 paper, “The Computer as a Communications Device,” written by J. C. R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor and published in the journal Science and Technology. Honoring Mr. Selfridge, the authors proposed a device they referred to as Oliver, an acronym for On-Line Interactive Vicarious Expediter and Responder. Oliver was one of the clearest early descriptions of a computerized personal assistant. With four other colleagues, Mr. Selfridge helped organize a 1956 conference at Dartmouth that led directly to creation of the field of artificial intelligence. “Oliver was one of the founding fathers of the discipline of artificial intelligence,” said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who is president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. “He has been well known in the field for his early and prescient writings on the challenge of endowing machines with the ability to learn to recognize patterns.” Oliver Gordon Selfridge, a grandson of H. Gordon Selfridge, the American who founded Selfridges department store in London, was born in London on May 10, 1926. The family lost control of the business during the Depression and emigrated to the United States at the onset of World War II. Mr. Selfridge attended Middlesex School in Concord, Mass., and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he graduated at 19 with a degree in mathematics. After service in the Navy, he embarked on graduate study at M.I.T. under Norbert Weiner, the pioneering theorist of computer science. He became one of Weiner’s collaborators but plunged into the working world of computer science before earning an advanced degree. In the 1960s Mr. Selfridge was associate director for Project MAC, an early time-shared computing research project at M.I.T. He did much of this work at the M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory, a federally financed research center for security technology. He then worked at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, now BBN Technologies, which develops computer and communications-related technology. In 1983 he became chief scientist for the telecommunications company GTE. He began advising the nation’s national security leaders in the 1950s, among other tasks serving on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and the Scientific Advisory Board of the National Security Agency. His first marriage, to Allison Gilman Selfridge, and his second, to Katherine Bull Selfridge, ended in divorce. Besides his companion, his survivors include their daughter, Olivia Selfridge Rissland of Belmont; three children from his first marriage, Peter Selfridge of Bethesda, Md.; Mallory Selfridge of Eastford, Conn.; and Caroline Selfridge of Saratoga, Calif.; a sister, Jennifer Selfridge MacLeod of Princeton Junction, N.J.; and six grandchildren. Along with producing scholarly papers and technical books, Mr. Selfridge wrote “Fingers Come in Fives,” “All About Mud” and “Trouble With Dragons,” all books for children. At his death he was working on a series of books he hoped might one day become an arithmetic equivalent of summer reading projects for schoolchildren. Mr. Selfridge never stopped theorizing, speaking and writing on what he saw as the future of artificial intelligence. “I want an agent that can learn and adapt as I might,” he once told a meeting organized by I.B.M. Such an agent would “infer what I would want it to do, from the updated purposes it has learned from working for me,” he went on, and “do as I want rather than the silly things I might say.”
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David M. Young

1923 - 2008
Professor David M. Young, Jr., obtained his Ph.D. in 1950 from Harvard University working under the direction of the late Professor Garrett Birkhoff. This work established the Successive Overrelaxation (SOR) method. Professor Young's career and many contributions almost exactly parallel the first fifty-years of the field of modern scientific computing. When Professor Young came to The University of Texas at Austin in 1958, he established the Computation Center and was its director until 1970 when he founded the Center for Numerical Analysis and served as its director until 1999. His research activity focused on the numerical solution of partial differential equations based on the use of finite difference methods and on the use of iterative methods to solve associated systems of linear algebraic equations involving matrices which are very large and sparse. Several computer software packages have been developed based on this research as part of the ITPACK project. The research is being extended to include methods suitable for shared memory and distributed memory parallel computers. More rapidly convergent iterative methods based on the use of parallel multilevel procedures and parallel alternating-type methods are also being developed.

 

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