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Carl E. Hewitt is Associate Professor Emeritus in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Hewitt is known for his design of Planner, which was the first programming language based on procedural plans that were invoked using pattern-directed invocation from assertions and goals. He is also known for his work on the Actor model of concurrent computation, which influenced the development of the Scheme programming language and the π calculus, and served as an inspiration for several other programming languages. His publications also include contributions in the areas of open information systems and multi-agent systems.

Education

Hewitt obtained his PhD in mathematics at MIT in 1971, under the supervision of Seymour Papert, Marvin Minsky, and Mike Paterson.

Work on Planner

The Planner language was developed as part of Hewitt's doctoral research in MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Hewitt's work on Planner introduced the notion of the "procedural embedding of knowledge", which was an alternative to the logical approach to knowledge encoding for artificial intelligence pioneered by John McCarthy. A subset of Planner called Micro Planner was implemented by Gerry Sussman, Eugene Charniak and Terry Winograd. It was used in Winograd's famous SHRDLU program, Charniak's natural language story understanding work, and McCarty's work on legal reasoning.

Work on the Actor Model

The Actor model was the original inspiration for Sussman and Steele's work on the Scheme programming language, and also provided the motivation for the development of a number of languages specifically intended to implement the Actor model, such as ACT-1, SALSA, Caltrop, and E. Hewitt's work on the Actor model of computation has spanned over 30 years, beginning with the introduction of the model in a 1973 paper authored by Hewitt, Peter Bishop, and Richard Steiger, and including new results on Actor model semantics published as recently as 2006. Much of this work was carried out in collaboration with students in Hewitt's Message Passing Semantics Group at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab.

MIT career

He retired from the faculty of the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science during the 1999-2000 school year. Among the doctoral students that Hewitt supervised during his time at MIT are Professor Gul Agha, Dr. Russell Atkinson, Dr. Henry Baker, Dr. Gerald Barber, Dr. Peter Bishop, Dr. Gene Ciccarelli, Professor William Clinger, Dr. Peter de Jong, Dr. Irene Greif, Dr. Kenneth Kahn, Dr. William Kornfeld and Professor Akinori Yonezawa.

Awards

From September 1989 to August 1990, Hewitt was the IBM Chair Visiting Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Keio University in Japan.

Selected works

• Carl Hewitt (1969). PLANNER: A Language for Proving Theorems in Robots IJCAI'69.
• Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop and Richard Steiger (1973). A Universal Modular Actor Formalism for Artificial Intelligence IJCAI'73.
• Carl Hewitt and Henry Baker (1977a). Laws for Communicating Parallel Processes IFIP'77.
• Carl Hewitt and Henry Baker (1977b). Actors and Continuous Functionals Proceeding of IFIP Working Conference on Formal Description of Programming Concepts. August 1–5, 1977.
• William Kornfeld and Carl Hewitt (1981). The Scientific Community Metaphor IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. January 1981.
• Henry Lieberman and Carl E. Hewitt (1983). A Real-Time Garbage Collector Based on the Lifetimes of Objects Communications of the {ACM}, 26(6).
• Carl Hewitt (1985). The Challenge of Open Systems Byte Magazine. April 1985. (Reprinted in The foundation of artificial intelligence--a sourcebook Cambridge University Press. 1990)

See also

• Scientific community metaphor

References

1. "EECS Department Faculty", MIT, accessed November 12, 2007.
2. Carl Hewitt. PLANNER: A Language for Proving Theorems in Robots IJCAI. 1969.
3. Filman, Robert (1984). "Actors". Coordinated Computing - Tools and Techniques for Distributed Software. McGraw-Hill. pp. pp. 145. ISBN 0-07-022439-0. Carl Hewitt and his colleagues at M.I.T. are developing the Actor model. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); line feed character in |title= at position 25 (help)
4. Krishnamurthi, Shriram (December 1994). "An Introduction to Scheme". Crossroads. 1 (2).
5. Milner, Robin (January 1993). "ACM Turing Award Lecture: The Elements of Interaction" (PDF). Communications of the ACM. 36 (1).
6. ^ Mark S. Miller (2006). "Robust Composition - Towards a Unified Approach to Access Control and Concurrency Control" (PDF). PhD dissertation. Johns Hopkins University. Retrieved 2007-05-26. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help); line feed character in |title= at position 21 (help)
7. Carl Hewitt (1986). "Offices Are Open Systems". ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 4(3): 271-287. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
8. Jacques Ferber (1999). Multi-Agent Systems: An Introduction to Distributed Artificial Intelligence. Addison-Wesley.
9. Carl Hewitt. Procedural Embedding of Knowledge In Planner IJCAI. 1971.
10. Philippe Rouchy, Aspects of PROLOG History: Logic Programming and Professional Dynamics, TeamEthno-Online Issue 2, June 2006, 85-100.
11. Gerry Sussman and Terry Winograd. Micro-planner Reference Manual AI Memo No, 203, MIT Project MAC, July 1970.
12. Terry Winograd. Procedures as a Representation for Data in a Computer Program for Understanding Natural Language MIT AI TR-235. January 1971.
13. Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert. “Progress Report on Artificial Intelligence” MIT AI Memo 252. 1971.
14. L. Thorne McCarty. "Reflections on TAXMAN: An Experiment on Artificial Intelligence and Legal Reasoning" Harvard Law Review. Vol. 90, No. 5, March 1977
15. Gerald Sussman and Guy Steele SCHEME: An Interpreter for Extended Lambda Calculus AI Memo 349, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Cambridge, Massachusetts, December 1975
16. Henry Lieberman, "Concurrent Object-Oriented Programming in Act 1", In Object-Oriented Concurrent Programming, A. Yonezawa and M. Tokoro, eds., MIT Press, 1987.
17. C. Varela and G. Agha. Programming Dynamically Reconfigurable Open Systems with SALSA. OOPSLA 2001 Intriguing Technology Track. ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 36(12):20-34, December 2001.
18. Johan Eker. "An introduction to the Caltrop actor language" (PDF). Retrieved 2007-06-20. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
19. Carl Hewitt (1973). "A Universal Modular Actor Formalism for Artificial Intelligence". IJCAI. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
20. Carl Hewitt What is Commitment? Physical, Organizational, and Social COIN@AAMAS. April 27, 2006.
21. Mark S. Miller. "Actors: Foundations for Open Systems". Retrieved 2007-06-20.
22. John V. Guttag (2000). "MIT Reports to the President 1999–2000 - Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science". Retrieved 2007-06-19.
23. Ryuichiro Ohyama (1991). "Department of Computer Science-Recent and Current Visiting Professors". Retrieved 2007-06-19.

External links

• h at DBLP Bibliography Server
• Carl Hewitt's seminars, publications, and biography.

Template:Persondata

• Living people
• American computer programmers
• American computer scientists
• American educators
• American mathematicians
• Formal methods people
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty
• American technology writers