James Hiram Morris (born 1941) is a professor (emeritus) of

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...

at Carnegie Mellon. He was previously dean of the

Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science The School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US is a school for computer science established in 1988. It has been consistently ranked among the top computer science programs over the decades. ...

and Dean of

Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley is a degree-granting branch campus of Carnegie Mellon University located in the heart of Silicon Valley in Mountain View, California. It was established in 2002 at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field. ...

Biography

A native of

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Western Pennsylvania, the second-most populous city in Pennsylva ...

, Morris received a Bachelor's degree from Carnegie Mellon University, an S.M. in Management from the

MIT Sloan School of Management The MIT Sloan School of Management (MIT Sloan or Sloan) is the business school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT Sloan offers bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree programs, ...

, and Ph.D. in

from

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

. Morris taught at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, where he developed some important underlying principles of programming languages: inter-module protection and

lazy evaluation In programming language theory, lazy evaluation, or call-by-need, is an evaluation strategy which delays the evaluation of an expression until its value is needed ( non-strict evaluation) and which also avoids repeated evaluations (sharing). The ...

. He was a co-discoverer of the Knuth–Morris–Pratt algorithm for string-search. For eight years, he worked at the

Xerox PARC PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xero ...

(Palo Alto Research Center), where he was part of the team that developed the

Xerox Alto The Xerox Alto is a computer designed from its inception to support an operating system based on a graphical user interface (GUI), later using the desktop metaphor. The first machines were introduced on 1 March 1973, a decade before mass-market ...

System. He also directed the Cedar programming environment project. From 1983 to 1988, Morris directed the Information Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, a joint project with IBM, which developed a prototype university computing system, the

Andrew Project The Andrew Project was a distributed computing environment developed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) beginning in 1982. It was an ambitious project for its time and resulted in an unprecedentedly vast and accessible university computing infras ...

. He has been the principal investigator of two

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

projects aimed at computer-mediated communication: EXPRES and Prep. He was a founder of the Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute and MAYA Design Group, a consulting firm specializing in interactive product design. He wrote a memior,
Thoughts of a Reformed Computer Scientist
', available on Amazon.

Selected papers

* D. E. Knuth, J. H. Morris, V. R. Pratt (1977). Fast Pattern Matching in Strings, SIAM Journal on Computing. 6 (2): 323–350 *Morris, J. H., Satyanarayanan, M., Conner, M. H., Howard, J. H., Rosenthal, D. S., & Smith, F. D. (1986). Andrew: a distributed personal computing environment. Communications of the Acm, 29(3), 184-201. *Henderson, P., & Morris, J. H. (1976). A lazy evaluator. ACM Sigact-Sigplan Symposium on Principles on Programming Languages (pp. 95–103). DBLP. *Neuwirth, C. M., Kaufer, D. S., Chandhok, R., & Morris, J. H. (1990). Issues in the design of computer support for co-authoring and commenting. ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 183–195). ACM. *Geschke, C. M., Morris, J. H., & Satterthwaite, E. H. (1977). Early experience with mesa. Communications of the Acm, 20(8), 540-553. *Morris, J. H. (1973). Protection in programming languages. Communications of the Acm, 16(16), 15-21. *Neuwirth, C. M., Kaufer, D. S., Chandhok, R., & Morris, J. H. (1994). Computer support for distributed collaborative writing: defining parameters of interaction. ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 145–152). ACM.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Morris, James H. American computer scientists Carnegie Mellon University faculty Carnegie Mellon University alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni MIT Sloan School of Management alumni Living people Human-Computer Interaction Institute faculty 1941 births Scientists at PARC (company)