WALKER@SRI-AI.ARPA (12/09/83)
From: Don Walker <WALKER@SRI-AI.ARPA>
CARL ENGELMAN MEMORIAL FUND
Carl Engelman, one of the pioneers in artificial intelligence
research, died of a heart attack at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
on November 26, 1983. He was the creator of MATHLAB, a program developed
in the 1960s for the symbolic manipulation of mathematical expressions.
His objective there was to supply the scientist with an interactive
computational aid of a "more intimate and liberating nature" than anything
available before. Many of the ideas generated in the development of MATHLAB
have influenced the architecture of other systems for symbolic and algebraic
manipulation.
Carl graduated from the City College of New York and then earned
an MS Degree in Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
During most of his professional career, he worked at The MITRE Corporation
in Bedford, Massachusetts. In 1973 he was on leave as a visiting professor
at the Institute of Information Science of the University of Turin, under a
grant from the Italian National Research Council.
At the time of his death Carl was an Associate Department Head
at MITRE, responsible for a number of research projects in artificial
intelligence. His best known recent work was KNOBS, a knowledge-based
system for interactive planning that was one of the first expert systems
applied productively to military problems. Originally developed for the
Air Force, KNOBS was then adapted for a Navy system and is currently being
used in two NASA applications. Other activities under his direction
included research on natural language understanding and automatic
programming.
Carl published a number of papers in journals and books and gave
presentations at many conferences. But he also illuminated every meeting
he attended with his incisive analysis and his keen wit. While he will
be remembered for his contributions to artificial intelligence, those
who knew him personally will deeply miss his warmth and humor, which he
generously shared with so many of us. Carl was particularly helpful to
people who had professional problems or faced career choices; his paternal
support, personal sponsorship, and private intervention made significant
differences for many of his colleagues.
Carl was a member of the American Association for Artificial
Intelligence, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the
American Mathematical Society, the Association for Computational
Linguistics, and the Association for Computing Machinery and its Special
Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence.
Contributions to the "Carl Engelman Memorial Fund" should be
sent to Judy Clapp at The MITRE Corporation, Bedford, Massachusetts 01730.
A decision will be made later on how those funds will be used.