Robert Wilensky (26 March 1951 – 15 March 2013) was 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 ...

and emeritus professor at the

UC Berkeley School of Information The University of California, Berkeley, School of Information, also known as the UC Berkeley School of Information or the I School, is a graduate school and, created in 1994, the newest of the schools at the University of California, Berkele ...

, with his main focus of research in

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech 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 university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

. In 1986, he worked as the doctoral advisor of

Peter Norvig Peter Norvig (born December 14, 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 t ...

, 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 member ...

"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 scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public understanding of artif ...

. He retired from faculty in 2007 and died on Friday, March 15, 2013, of a bacterial infection at the

Alta Bates Summit Medical Center Sutter Health Alta Bates Summit Medical Center is located in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area. Its three hospital campuses are located in Berkeley (Alta Bates Campus, Herrick Campus) and Oakland (Summit Campus). Alta Bates Summit is a ...

. 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 an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

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

LISP A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech. Types * A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lisping ...

, ''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.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wilensky, Robert Artificial intelligence researchers American computer scientists 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 Computer scientists

Academic career

Research

See also

References