Robert Wilensky (26 March 1951 – 15 March 2013) was an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

and emeritus professor at the

UC Berkeley School of Information The University of California, Berkeley School of Information (sometimes abbreviated as Berkeley I School) is a graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, a public university in Berkeley, California. The school was established in 1 ...

, with his main focus of research in

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

Academic career

In 1971, Wilensky received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from Yale University, and in 1978, a Ph.D. in computer science from the same institution. After finishing his thesis, "Understanding Goal-Based Stories", Wilensky joined the faculty from the EECS Department of

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkele ...

. In 1986, he worked as the doctoral advisor of

Peter Norvig Peter Norvig (born 14 December 1956) is an American computer scientist and Distinguished Education Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. He previously served as a director of research and search quality at Google. Norvig is th ...

, who then later published the standard textbook of the field: '' Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach''. From 1993 to 1997, Wilensky was the Berkeley Computer Science Division Chair. During this time, he also served as director of the Berkeley Cognitive Science Program, director of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Project, and board member of the

International Computer Science Institute The International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) is an independent, non-profit research organization located in Berkeley, California, United States. Since its founding in 1988, ICSI has maintained an affiliation agreement with the University ...

. In 1997, he became a fellow of 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 ...

"for research contributions to the areas of natural language processing and digital libraries as well as outstanding leadership in Computer Science." Furthermore, he also was a Fellow of the

Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is an international Learned society, scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public under ...

. He retired from faculty in 2007 and died on Friday, March 15, 2013, of a bacterial infection at the Alta Bates Summit Medical Center. Wilensky was married to Ann Danforth and he is survived by her and their two children, Avi and Eli Wilensky

Research

Throughout his career, Wilensky authored and co-authored over 60 scholarly articles and technical reports on AI,

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

, and information dissemination. In addition to his numerous technical publications, Wilensky also published two books on the programming language

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, ...

, ''LISPcraft'' and ''Common LISPcraft'', and had almost completed another book manuscript when he suffered a cardiac arrest and stopped writing. Among his publications are: * R. Wilensky, (1986-09-17). ''Common LISPcraft''. W. W. Norton & Company. . * T. A. Phelps and R. Wilensky, "Toward active, extensible, networked documents: Multivalent architecture and applications," in Proc. 1st ACM Intl. Conf. on Digital Libraries, E. A. Fox and G. Marchionini, Eds., New York, NY: ACM Press, 1996, pp. 100–108. * J. Traupman and R. Wilensky, "Experiments in Improving Unsupervised Word Sense Disambiguation," University of California, Berkeley, Department of EECS, Computer Science Division, Tech. Rep. 03–1227, Feb. 2003. * R. Wilensky, Planning and Understanding: A Computational Approach to Human Reasoning, Advanced Book Program, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1983. * R. Wilensky, "Understanding Goal-Based Stories," Yale University, Sep. 1978. * B. Kahn and R. Wilensky, "A Framework for Distributed Digital Object Services", May 1995.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wilensky, Robert American artificial intelligence researchers American computer scientists 1997 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence 1951 births 2013 deaths Natural language processing researchers Yale University alumni

Academic career

Research

See also

References