David Luckham is an emeritus professor of

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

. As a graduate student at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

(MIT), he was one of the implementers of the first systems for the

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...

Lisp Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish notation#Explanation, prefix notation. Originally specified in the late 1950s, ...

. He is best known as the originator of

complex event processing Event processing is a method of tracking and analyzing (processing) streams of information (data) about things that happen (events), and deriving a conclusion from them. Complex event processing (CEP) consists of a set of concepts and techniques de ...

(CEP) as proposed in his 2002 book ''The Power of Events''. CEP consists of a set of concepts and techniques for processing

real-time Real-time, realtime, or real time may refer to: Computing * Real-time computing, hardware and software systems subject to a specified time constraint * Real-time clock, a computer clock that keeps track of the current time * Real-time Control Syst ...

events and extracting information from event streams as they arrive. CEP has since become an enabling technology in many systems that are used to take immediate action in response to incoming streams of events. Applications are described in this book that may now be found in many sectors of business including stock market trading systems, mobile devices, internet operations, fraud detection, the transport industry, and government intelligence gathering. The book also describes advanced event processing techniques such as event abstraction and event hierarchies that are not yet in general practice. Luckham's latest book is ''Event Processing for Business: Organizing the Real-Time Enterprise''. Luckham has held faculty and invited faculty positions in both mathematics and computer science at eight major universities in Europe and the United States. He was a cofounder of

Rational Software Rational Machines is an enterprise founded by Paul Levy and Mike Devlin in 1981 to provide tools to expand the use of modern software engineering practices, particularly explicit modular architecture and iterative development. It changed its n ...

, Inc., in 1981. He supplied the

compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that Translator (computing), translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primaril ...

for the language Ada, from which the company's first products were developed, and served as a member of the initial software development team. An acknowledged leader in

high-level programming language A high-level programming language is a programming language with strong Abstraction (computer science), abstraction from the details of the computer. In contrast to low-level programming languages, it may use natural language ''elements'', be ea ...

s for

multiprocessing Multiprocessing (MP) is the use of two or more central processing units (CPUs) within a single computer system. The term also refers to the ability of a system to support more than one processor or the ability to allocate tasks between them. The ...

, annotation languages, and event-based simulation systems for both hardware and software architectures, Luckham has published more than 100 technical articles, two of them winning Best Paper Awards from the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...

(ACM) and the

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE has a corporate office ...

(IEEE). He was born in

Kingston Kingston may refer to: Places * List of places called Kingston, including the six most populated: ** Kingston, Jamaica ** Kingston upon Hull, England ** City of Kingston, Victoria, Australia ** Kingston, Ontario, Canada ** Kingston upon Thames, ...

in the British

Colony of Jamaica The Crown Colony of Jamaica and Dependencies was a British colony from 1655, when it was Invasion of Jamaica (1655), captured by the The Protectorate, English Protectorate from the Spanish Empire. Jamaica became a British Empire, British colon ...

, and raised in London during

The Blitz The Blitz (English: "flash") was a Nazi Germany, German bombing campaign against the United Kingdom, for eight months, from 7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941, during the Second World War. Towards the end of the Battle of Britain in 1940, a co ...

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

. He holds the degrees

Master of Science A Master of Science (; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree. In contrast to the Master of Arts degree, the Master of Science degree is typically granted for studies in sciences, engineering and medici ...

(M.Sc.) from London, and

Doctor of Philosophy A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of Postgraduate education, graduate study and original resear ...

(Ph.D.) from the

(MIT) in

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

and

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

References

External links

*, Stanford
Brief biography at Complexevents.comDavid Luckham
at the

Mathematics Genealogy Project The Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP) is a web-based database for the academic genealogy of mathematicians.. it contained information on 300,152 mathematical scientists who contributed to research-level mathematics. For a typical mathematicia ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Luckham, David American computer scientists Stanford University School of Engineering faculty Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Lisp (programming language) people Programming language designers Ada (programming language) Living people Year of birth missing (living people)