Citizendia

Alan Curtis Kay
Alan C. Kay
Alan C. Kay
BornMay 17, 1940 (1940-05-17) (age 68)
CitizenshipUnited States
FieldsComputer Science
InstitutionsXerox PARC
Atari
Apple Inc. ATG
Walt Disney Imagineering
UCLA
Kyoto University
MIT
Viewpoints Research Institute
Hewlett-Packard Labs
Alma materUniversity of Colorado at Boulder, University of Utah
Known forDynabook
object-oriented programming
Smalltalk
graphical user interface windows

Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) is an American computer scientist, known for his early pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design. Events 1521 - Edward Stafford 3rd Duke of Buckingham, is executed for Treason. Year 1940 ( MCMXL) was a Leap year starting on Monday (link will display the full 1940 calendar of the Gregorian calendar. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the Computer science (or computing science) is the study and the Science of the theoretical foundations of Information and Computation and their PARC (Palo Alto Research Center Inc formerly Xerox PARC, is a Research and development company in Palo Alto California that began as a division of Atari is a corporate and brand name owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. Apple Inc, ( formerly Apple Computer Inc, is an American Multinational corporation with a focus on designing and manufacturing Consumer electronics The Advanced Technology Group (ATG was a corporate research laboratory at Apple Computer from 1986 to 1997 Walt Disney Imagineering was formed by entertainment mogul Walt Disney on December 16, 1952 as WED Enterprises (WED Walter Elias Disney to The University of California Los Angeles (generally known as UCLA) is a public research university located in Westwood Los Angeles, California, United or is a major national university in Kyoto, Japan. It is the second oldest university in Japan and formerly one of the Imperial Universities of HP Labs (or HP Laboratories) is the exploratory and advanced research group for Hewlett-Packard. Alma mater is Latin for "nourishing mother" It was used in Ancient Rome as a title for the mother Goddess, and in Medieval The University of Colorado at Boulder ( CU-Boulder, UCB officially Colorado and CU colloquially is the Flagship University The University of Utah (referred to locally as ' The U' or ' the U of U') is a publicly funded Research university in Salt Lake The Dynabook was a conceptual system proposed by Xerox PARC in 1968 Object-oriented programming (OOP is a Programming paradigm that uses " objects " and their interactions to design applications and computer programs Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. In Computing, a window is a visual area usually rectangular in shape containing some kind of User interface, displaying the output of and allowing input for one Events 1521 - Edward Stafford 3rd Duke of Buckingham, is executed for Treason. Year 1940 ( MCMXL) was a Leap year starting on Monday (link will display the full 1940 calendar of the Gregorian calendar. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the A computer scientist is a person that has acquired knowledge of Computer science, the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their application Object-oriented programming (OOP is a Programming paradigm that uses " objects " and their interactions to design applications and computer programs In Computing, a window is a visual area usually rectangular in shape containing some kind of User interface, displaying the output of and allowing input for one He is the president of the Viewpoints Research Institute, and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. The University of California Los Angeles (generally known as UCLA) is a public research university located in Westwood Los Angeles, California, United He is also on the advisory board of TTI/Vanguard. TTI/Vanguard is a Santa Monica-based company that puts on five conferences a year for senior business executives exploring upcoming trends in technology with a 2-5 year horizon Until mid 2005, he was a Senior Fellow at HP Labs, a Visiting Professor at Kyoto University, and an Adjunct Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). HP Labs (or HP Laboratories) is the exploratory and advanced research group for Hewlett-Packard. or is a major national university in Kyoto, Japan. It is the second oldest university in Japan and formerly one of the Imperial Universities of [1]

Contents

Early life and work

Originally from Springfield, Massachusetts, Kay attended the University of Colorado at Boulder, earning a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Molecular Biology. Springfield is a City in and the County seat of Hampden County, Massachusetts, United States. The University of Colorado at Boulder ( CU-Boulder, UCB officially Colorado and CU colloquially is the Flagship University A bachelor's degree is usually an Undergraduate Academic degree awarded for a course or major that generally lasts for three four or in some cases and Before and during this time, he worked as a professional jazz guitarist. Jazz is an American Musical art form which originated in the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States

In 1966, he began graduate school at the University of Utah, earning a Master's degree and Ph.D.. The University of Utah (referred to locally as ' The U' or ' the U of U') is a publicly funded Research university in Salt Lake "PhD" redirects here for other uses see PhD (disambiguation. There, he worked with Ivan Sutherland, who had done pioneering graphics programs including Sketchpad. Ivan Edward Sutherland (born 1938 in Hastings, Nebraska) is an American Computer scientist and Internet pioneer Sketchpad (aka Robot Draftsman was a revolutionary computer program written by Ivan Sutherland in 1963 in the course of his PhD thesis for which he received the Turing This greatly inspired Kay's evolving views on objects and programming. As he grew busier with ARPA research, he quit his career as a professional musician. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new Technology

In 1968, he met Seymour Papert and learned of the Logo programming language, a dialect of Lisp optimized for educational use. Seymour Papert (born February 29, 1928 in Pretoria South Africa) is an MIT Mathematician, computer scientist, and Logo is a Computer programming language used for Functional programming. A programming language is an Artificial language that can be used to write programs which control the behavior of a machine particularly a Computer. Lisp (or LISP) is a family of Computer Programming languages with a long history and a distinctive fully parenthesized syntax Education encompasses both the Teaching and Learning of Knowledge, proper conduct, and technical competency This led him to learn of the work of Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, Lev Vygotsky, and of Constructivism. Jean Piaget pjaʒɛ ( August 9, 1896 &ndash September 16, 1980) was a Swiss philosopher, natural scientist Jerome Seymour Bruner (born 1 October, 1915) is an American Psychologist who has contributed to Cognitive psychology and Cognitive Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (Russian Лев Семёнович Выготский ( November 17 ( November 5 Old Style) 1896 – June 11, 1934 Constructivism is a psychological theory of knowledge ( Epistemology) which argues that humans construct knowledge and meaning from their experiences These further influenced his views.

In 1970, Kay joined Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center, PARC. Xerox Corporation ( (name ˈziːrɒks is a global document management company which manufactures and sells a range of color and black-and-white printers, multifunction Palo Alto (ˌpæloʊˈæltoʊ from Spanish: palo: "stick" and alto: "high" i PARC (Palo Alto Research Center Inc formerly Xerox PARC, is a Research and development company in Palo Alto California that began as a division of In the 1970s he was one of the key members there to develop prototypes of networked workstations using the programming language Smalltalk. Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. These inventions were later commercialized by Apple Computer in their Lisa and Macintosh computers. Apple Inc, ( formerly Apple Computer Inc, is an American Multinational corporation with a focus on designing and manufacturing Consumer electronics For the MOS 6502 assembler for Apple II computers see Lisa assembler. Macintosh, commonly nicknamed Mac is a Brand name which covers several lines of Personal computers designed developed and marketed by Apple Inc

Kay is one of the fathers of the idea of object-oriented programming, which he named, along with some colleagues at PARC and predecessors at the Norwegian Computing Center. Object-oriented programming (OOP is a Programming paradigm that uses " objects " and their interactions to design applications and computer programs Norwegian Computing Center (NR in Norwegian Norsk Regnesentral) is a private independent Non-profit research foundation founded in 1952 He conceived the Dynabook concept which defined the conceptual basics for laptop and tablet computers and E-books, and is the architect of the modern overlapping windowing graphical user interface (GUI)[1]. The Dynabook was a conceptual system proposed by Xerox PARC in 1968 A laptop computer, also known as a notebook computer, is a small Personal computer designed for mobile use. A Tablet PC is a Notebook or slate-shaped Mobile computer, equipped with a Touchscreen or Graphics tablet/screen hybrid technology which allows An e-book (for electronic book: also ebook) is the Digital media equivalent of a conventional printed Book. Because the Dynabook was conceived as an educational platform, Kay is considered to be one of the first researchers into mobile learning, and indeed, many features of the Dynabook concept have been adopted in the design of the One Laptop Per Child educational platform, with which Kay is actively involved. M-learning, or "mobile learning" now commonly abbreviated to "mLearning" has different meanings for different communities

After 10 years at Xerox PARC, Kay became Atari's chief scientist for three years. Atari is a corporate and brand name owned by several entities since its inception in 1972.

Recent work and recognition

Starting in 1984, Kay was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer until the closing of the ATG (Advanced Technology Group), one of the company's R&D divisions. Apple Inc, ( formerly Apple Computer Inc, is an American Multinational corporation with a focus on designing and manufacturing Consumer electronics The Advanced Technology Group (ATG was a corporate research laboratory at Apple Computer from 1986 to 1997 He then joined Walt Disney Imagineering as a Disney Fellow and remained there until Disney ended its Disney Fellow program. Walt Disney Imagineering was formed by entertainment mogul Walt Disney on December 16, 1952 as WED Enterprises (WED Walter Elias Disney to After Disney, in 2001 he founded Viewpoints Research Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to children, learning, and advanced software development. Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) is an American Computer scientist, known for his early pioneering work on Object-oriented programming

Later, Kay worked with a team at Applied Minds, then became a Senior Fellow at Hewlett-Packard until HP disbanded the Advanced Software Research Team on July 20 2005. Applied Minds Inc is a company founded in 2000 by ex- Disney Imagineers Danny Hillis and Bran Ferren that provides Technology He is currently head of Viewpoints Institute.

Squeak, Etoys, and Croquet

In December 1995, when he was still at Apple, Kay collaborated with many others to start the open source Squeak dynamic media software, and he continues to work on it. The Squeak Programming language is a Smalltalk implementation derived directly from Smalltalk-80 by a group at Apple Computer that included some of the original Smalltalk-80 In this time, in November 1996, his team began research on what became the Etoys system. Etoys is a child-friendly Computer environment and object-oriented prototype-based programming language for use in More recently he started, along with David A. Smith, David P. Reed, Andreas Raab, Rick McGeer, Julian Lombardi, and Mark McCahill, the Croquet Project, which is an open source networked 2D and 3D environment for collaborative work. David A Smith may refer to David A Smith (computer scientist (b David P Reed (born January 31, 1952) is an American computer scientist educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known for a number Julian Lombardi (born Nov 11, 1956) is an American Inventor, Author, Educator, and Computer scientist known Mark P McCahill (born February 7, 1956) has been involved in developing and popularizing a number of Internet technologies since the late 1980s The Croquet Project is an International effort to promote the continued development of Croquet a free software platform and a

Tweak

In 2001, it became clear that the Etoy architecture in Squeak had reached its limits in what the Morphic interface infrastructure could do. Andreas Raab was a researcher working in Kay's group, then at Hewlett-Packard. He proposed defining a "script process" and providing a default scheduling mechanism that avoids several more general problems [2]. The result was a new user interface, proposed to replace the Squeak Morphic user interface in the future. Tweak added mechanisms of islands, asynchronous messaging, players and costumes, language extensions, projects, and tile scripting [3]. Tweak is a graphical User interface (GUI layer to the Squeak development environment which in turn is an Integrated development environment Its underlying object system is class-based, o users, during programming (scripting), it acts like it is prototype-based. In Object-oriented programming, a class is a Programming language construct that is used as a blueprint to create objects This blueprint includes attributes Prototype-based programming is a style of Object-oriented programming in which classes are not present and behavior reuse (known as inheritance in class-based Tweak objects are created and run in Tweak project windows.

Children's Machine

In November 2005, at the World Summit on the Information Society, the MIT research laboratories unveiled a new laptop computer, for educational use around the world. The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS was a pair of United Nations -sponsored conferences about Information, Communication and in broad terms It has many names: the $100 Laptop, the One Laptop per Child program, the Children's Machine, and the XO-1. The XO-1, previously known as the $100 Laptop or Children's Machine, is an inexpensive Laptop computer intended to be distributed to children in developing The program was begun and is sustained by Kay's friend, Nicholas Negroponte, and is based on Kay's Dynabook ideal. Nicholas Negroponte (born December 1, 1943) is a Greek-American Architect and Computer scientist best known as the founder and Chairman The Dynabook was a conceptual system proposed by Xerox PARC in 1968 Kay is a prominent co-developer of the computer, focusing on its educational software using Squeak and Etoys.

Reinventing programming

Kay has lectured extensively on the idea that the Computer Revolution is very new, and all of the good ideas have not been universally implemented. Lectures at OOPSLA 1997 conference and his ACM Turing award talk, entitled "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet" were informed by his experiences with Sketchpad, Simula, Smalltalk, and the bloated code of commercial software. Sketchpad (aka Robot Draftsman was a revolutionary computer program written by Ivan Sutherland in 1963 in the course of his PhD thesis for which he received the Turing Simula is a name for two programming languages Simula I and Simula 67 developed in the 1960s at the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo, by Ole-Johan Dahl Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language.

On 31 August 2006, Kay's proposal to the United States National Science Foundation, NSF, was granted, thus funding Viewpoints Research Institute for several years. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the The National Science Foundation (NSF is a United States Government agency that supports fundamental Research and Education in all the non-medical The proposal title is: Steps Toward the Reinvention of Programming: A compact and Practical Model of Personal Computing as a Self-exploratorium [4]. A sense of what Kay is trying to do comes from this quote, from the abstract of a seminar on this given at Intel Research Labs, Berkeley: "The conglomeration of commercial and most open source software consumes in the neighborhood of several hundreds of millions of lines of code these days. We wonder: how small could be an understandable practical "Model T" design that covers this functionality? 1M lines of code? 200K LOC? 100K LOC? 20K LOC?" [5]

The system being developed makes extensive use of parsing via a bottom up rewrite grammar [6], [7], [8]. In Computer science and Linguistics, parsing, or more formally syntactic analysis, is the process of analyzing a sequence of tokens to In Computer science and Linguistics, parsing, or more formally syntactic analysis, is the process of analyzing a sequence of tokens to In Formal semantics, Computer science and Linguistics, a formal grammar (also called formation rules) is a precise description of a Formal

Besides Kay, several key persons are working on this effort. Ted Kaehler and Dan Ingalls are former Xerox PARC researchers who have worked with Kay for decades; Ingalls now works at Sun Microsystems. Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls Jr is a pioneer of object-oriented Computer programming and the principal architect, designer and implementor of Sun Microsystems Inc ( is a multinational vendor of Computers computer components Computer software, and Information technology services Ian Piumarta is a former INRIA researcher [9], with Alessandro (Alex) Warth, a UCLA Ph. The Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique ( INRIA) ( English National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control) is D. computer science student[10]; both now work at Viewpoints. Piumarta's work is documented on his website [11], and includes the Virtual Virtual Machine, a multi-language, hardware independent execution platform [12]. In Computer science, a virtual machine (VM is a Software implementation of a machine (computer that executes programs like a real machine Andreas Raab lead the Tweak effort while working at Impara GmbH, he now works for Qwaq Inc. Yoshiki Ohshima [13], a former student at Tokyo Institute of Technology, ported Squeak to Sharp Zaurus, maintains the iPAQ port, and made a multilingual Squeak. often called Tokyo Tech, TiTech or for short is the largest institution of higher learning in Japan dedicated to science and Technology. () is a Japanese Electronics manufacturer founded in 1912 It takes its name from one of its founder's first inventions the Ever-Sharp Mechanical pencil, which The Sharp Zaurus is the name of a series of Personal Digital Assistant (PDA made by Sharp Corporation. This article is about the iPAQ PDA; for the iPAQ Desktop Personal Computer see IPAQ (desktop computer.

Awards and honors

Alan Kay has received many awards and honors. Among them:

Other honors: J-D Warnier Prix d’Informatique, ACM Systems Software Award, NEC Computers & Communication Foundation Prize, Funai Foundation Prize, Lewis Branscomb Technology Award, ACM SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education.

Personal background

Kay is an avid and skilled musician who plays keyboard instruments and guitar. A musician is a person who plays or writes Music. Musicians can be classified by their roles in creating or performing music An instrumentalist plays a A keyboard instrument is any musical instrument played using a Musical keyboard. The guitar is a Musical instrument with ancient roots that is used in a wide variety of musical styles He has a special interest in early keyboard instruments like the baroque pipe organ and old guitars. Baroque art redirects here Please disambiguate such links to Baroque painting, Baroque sculpture, etc The pipe organ is a Musical instrument that produces sound when pressurized air (wind is driven through a series of pipes, controlled by a keyboard He was a former professional jazz and rock and roll guitarist. Rock music is a genre of Popular music often though not necessarily employing Electric guitar, Bass guitar, and Drums. A guitarist is a Musician who plays the Guitar. Guitarists may perform solo pieces or play with ensembles and bands of a wide variety of genres He is married to Bonnie MacBird, a writer, actor, artist, television producer who shares his passion for music. Bonnie MacBird is an Actress, Playwright, Scriptwriter, and producer. A writer is anyone who creates a written work although the word usually designates those who write creatively or professionally as well as those who have written in many different forms An actor, actress, player or thespian (see terminology) is a person who Acts in a Dramatic production and who works The definition of an artist is wide-ranging and covers a broad spectrum of Activities to do with creating Art, practicing the Arts and/or demonstrating The primary role of a television producer is to control all aspects of production ranging from show idea development and cast hiring to shoot supervision and fact-checking

References

  1. ^ Bergin, Jr. , Thomas J. & Gibson, Jr. , Richard G. (1996), History of Programming Languages -- II, New York, NY: ACM Press, Addison-Wesley, <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=234286> 

2. Pendulum refers to Alan Kay's famous quote "The best way to predict the future is to invent it. " in their song Distress Signal. [1] [http://www.lololyrics.com/lyrics/1524.html ]

Articles

External links


Persondata
NAMEKay, Alan Curtis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTIONComputer Science
DATE OF BIRTHMay 17, 1940 (1940-05-17) (age 68)
PLACE OF BIRTH
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH
Computer science (or computing science) is the study and the Science of the theoretical foundations of Information and Computation and their Events 1521 - Edward Stafford 3rd Duke of Buckingham, is executed for Treason. Year 1940 ( MCMXL) was a Leap year starting on Monday (link will display the full 1940 calendar of the Gregorian calendar.
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