Michael E. Lesk (born 1945) is an American
computer scientist
A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science.
Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...
.
Biography
In the 1960s, Michael Lesk worked for the
SMART Information Retrieval System project, wrote much of its retrieval code and did many of the retrieval experiments, as well as obtaining a
BA degree in Physics and Chemistry from
Harvard College in 1964 and a
PhD PHD or PhD may refer to:
* Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification
Entertainment
* '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series
* ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic
* Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group
** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...
from
Harvard University in
Chemical Physics in 1969.
From 1970 to 1984, Lesk worked at
Bell Labs in the group that built
Unix. Lesk wrote Unix tools for word processing (''
tbl'', ''
refer
Refer or referral may refer to:
*Reference, a relation of designation or linking between objects
**Word-sense disambiguation, when a single term may refer to multiple meanings
*Referral marketing, to personally recommend, endorse, and pass a perso ...
'', and the standard ''ms'' macro package, all for ''
troff''), for compiling (''
Lex''), and for networking (''
uucp''). He also wrote the Portable I/O Library (the predecessor to
stdio.h
The C programming language provides many standard library functions for file input and output. These functions make up the bulk of the C standard library header . The functionality descends from a "portable I/O package" written by Mike Lesk ...
in
C) and contributed significantly to the development of the
C language preprocessor.
In 1984, he left to work for
Bellcore, where he managed the computer science research group.
There, Lesk worked on specific information systems applications, mostly with
geography (a system for driving directions) and
dictionaries
A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by radical and stroke for ideographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies, p ...
(a system for
disambiguating words in context).
In the 1990s, Lesk worked on a large chemical information system, the CORE project, with
Cornell
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...
,
Online Computer Library Center,
American Chemical Society, and
Chemical Abstracts Service.
From 1998 to 2002, Lesk headed the
National Science Foundation's Division of Information and Intelligent Systems, where he oversaw Phase 2 of the NSF's Digital Library Initiative.
Currently, he is a professor on the faculty of the Library and Information Science Department, School of Communication & Information,
Rutgers University.
Lesk received the ''Flame'' award for lifetime achievement from
Usenix in 1994, is a Fellow of the
ACM
ACM or A.C.M. may refer to:
Aviation
* AGM-129 ACM, 1990–2012 USAF cruise missile
* Air chief marshal
* Air combat manoeuvring or dogfighting
* Air cycle machine
* Arica Airport (Colombia) (IATA: ACM), in Arica, Amazonas, Colombia
Computing
* ...
in 1996,
and in 2005 was elected to the
National Academy of Engineering.
He has authored a number of books.
See also
*
Lesk algorithm The Lesk algorithm is a classical algorithm for word sense disambiguation introduced by Michael E. Lesk in 1986.
Overview
The Lesk algorithm is based on the assumption that words in a given "neighborhood" (section of text) will tend to share a com ...
Bibliography
Selected books by Michael Lesk:
* ''Practical Digital Libraries: Books, Bytes, and Bucks'', 1997. .
* ''Understanding Digital Libraries'', 2nd ed., December 2004. .
References
External links
Michael Lesk personal website*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lesk, Michael
1945 births
Living people
Harvard College alumni
American computer programmers
Scientists at Bell Labs
Rutgers University faculty
Unix people
Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering
Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
Troff
Computational linguistics researchers
Data miners