Institution: University of California at Berkeley
Vitae: Born in Philadelphia, PA, U.S.A. Studied Electrical Engineering and Computing for B.S. and MS; then received a PhD from the University of Michigan in Communication Sciences. Started teaching while a graduate student at Michigan and then joined the faculty of the E.E. Dept at the University of California at Berkeley. Assistant Professor from '63 to '66, Associate Prof from '66 to '71. Full professor from '71 to '94. Now Professor Emeritus and also Professor in the Graduate School at Berkeley.
In addition, I have been associated with the following Universities as a sabbatical visitor or visiting lecturer: MIT, Harvard University, Hebrew University, University of San Paulo, Pontifica Universidade de Rio de Janeiro, University of Chile, University of Frankfurt, and Stanford University. Part of those travels took place while on a Guggenheim Fellowship.
I have been an editor of many journals including Discrete Mathematics, Discrete Applied Mathematics, Annals of Discrete Mathematics, Theoretical Computer Science, Journal of Computer and System Sciences, Journal of the ACM, Information Processing Letters, Future Generation Computer Systems, IECE, and now J-UCS.
Professional service: Consulting Editor in Computer Science for Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., National Lecturer for ACM, Chairman of SIGACT, Distinguished Visitor of the IEEE Computer Society, Member of ACM Council, Chairman of ACM SIG Board and External Activities Board, Program Committees for scores of conferences, Chairman of ACM Turing Award Committee, Vice President of ACM, Director and Member of Executive Committee of AFIPS, Member of Computer Science and Technology Board of the National Research Council, Chairman of the NRC Panel on International Developments in Microelectronics and Computer Science, Executive Committee of CSNET, Director and Trustee of the Charles Babbage Institute.
On the industrial side, a former PhD student and I started a software company, Gain Technology, to build multimedia software for UNIX workstations. Gain grew from only the two founders in late 1989 to over one hundred employees in the fall of 1992. The company's main product, called GainMomentum, is a comprehensive multimedia authoring system for UNIX workstations. This product won the SunWorld Prize for the Best Product of 1992. GainMomentum continues to dominate the workstation market for multimedia authoring systems. In the fall of 1992, Gain was acquired by Sybase Inc.
I am now involved in a number of startups through investment, board service and/or consulting.
Authored seven books and over 200 technical publications in a variety of areas. My research interests over the years started with switching and automata theory. At Berkeley my focus shifted towards automata theory and discrete systems. This led to work on formal language theory and ultimately its application to fast parsing methods for compilers as well as getting the fastest practical algorithm for general context free recognition. Starting switching towards software research. A simple abstract model of protection in operating systems was invented which had far-reaching consequences.
A sabbatical at Stanford University stimulated interest in building software. We built an advanced environment for electronic document production. As part of this work, we created a PostScript Interpreter, a debugger for the PostScript language, bibliographic processing systems, automatic indexing techniques, etc. Currently, working with a colleague to develop the Ensemble System. Ensemble is a framework for the integrated support of interactive development of complex natural language and formal language documents.
Also interested in research on environments for hypermedia authoring systems.
Creation Date: July 6, 1995
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