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Carl Hewitt is an emeritus professor from MIT.

He is known for his design of Planner that was the first AI language based on procedural plans that were invoked using pattern directed invocation from assertions and goals. Carl (then a student of Marvin Minsky, Seymour Papert and Mike Paterson) championed the "procedural embedding of knowledge" in the form of high level procedural plans in contrast to the logical approach pioneered by John McCarthy (computer scientist) who advocated expressing knowledge declaratively in logic for Artificial Intelligence. A subset of Planner called Micro Planner was implemented by Gerry Sussman, Eugene Charniak and Terry Winograd. It was used in Terry's famous SHRDLU program and a couple of other projects.

Carl and his students are also known for their work on the Actor model. Actors are the universal primitives of concurrent computation. The Actor work built on Lisp, Simula, Smalltalk-80, capability-based systems, and packet communication systems (e.g., the Internet).

Together with his student Bill Kornfeld, he developed the Scientific Community Metaphor. He has also made contributions in the areas of garbage collection (computer science), programming language design and implementation, open systems, negotiation forums, and multi-agency systems with his students and colleagues.

More recently Carl has worked to integrate sociology, anthropology, organization science, the philosophy of science, and services science into information science.

• American computer scientists
• American mathematicians
• American writers
• Computer pioneers
• Programmers
• Technology writers