| Michael E. Lesk | |
|---|---|
| Born | United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Known for | Lesk algorithm, Lex, SMART |
| Awards | ACM Fellow (1996) NAE Member (2005) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | IR, NLP, Programming languages |
| Institutions | Bellcore, Rutgers University |
Michael E. Lesk (born 1945) is an American computer scientist.
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 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, 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 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 system for disambiguating words in context). In the 1990s, Lesk worked on a large chemical information system, the CORE project, with Cornell, 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. He was a professor on the faculty of the Library and Information Science Department, School of Communication & Information, Rutgers University, from 2003 to 2023.
Lesk received the Flame award for lifetime achievement from Usenix in 1994, is a Fellow of the ACM in 1996, and in 2005 was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He has authored a number of books.
See also
Bibliography
Selected books by Michael Lesk:
- Practical Digital Libraries: Books, Bytes, and Bucks, 1997. ISBN 978-1-55860-459-9.
- Understanding Digital Libraries, 2nd ed., December 2004. ISBN 978-1-55860-924-2.
References
- ^ "Michael E Lesk: ACM Fellows". ACM. 1996. Retrieved 9 December 2017.
- ^ "Michael Lesk's Grade Crossing on the Information Superhighway". lesk.com. Retrieved 9 December 2017.
- ^ "Michael E. Lesk" (PDF). Rutgers University. 8 June 2008. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-12-10. Retrieved 9 December 2017.
- Dennis M. Ritchie (1993). "The Development of the C Language". Association for Computing Machinery. Archived from the original on 1998-02-20. Retrieved 2011-03-08.
- "Michael Lesk". Rutgers University. Retrieved 9 December 2017.
- "Michael Lesk, Who Helped Build the Computer Operating System Unix, Transitions to Professor Emeritus". iSchools. Retrieved 9 November 2023.
- "Michael Lesk: Rutgers University". nationalacademies.org. National Academy of Engineering. Retrieved 9 December 2017.
- ^ "Books: Michael E. Lesk". Amazon.co.uk. Retrieved 9 December 2017.
External links
- Michael Lesk personal website
- Mike Lesk at DBLP Bibliography Server
- 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
- 1996 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
- Troff
- Computational linguistics researchers
- Data miners