Mike Lesk
Encyclopedia
Michael E. Lesk is a computer programmer.

In the 1960s, Michael Lesk worked for the SMART Information Retrieval System
SMART Information Retrieval System
The SMART Information Retrieval System is an information retrieval system developed at Cornell University in the 1960s...

 project, wrote much of its retrieval code and did many of the retrieval experiments, as well as obtaining a PhD in Chemical Physics
Chemical physics
Chemical physics is a subdiscipline of chemistry and physics that investigates physicochemical phenomena using techniques from atomic and molecular physics and condensed matter physics; it is the branch of physics that studies chemical processes from the point of view of physics...

.

In the 1970s, he worked at Bell Labs
Bell Labs
Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...

, in the group that built Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

. Lesk wrote Unix tools for word processing (tbl
Tbl
Part of the troff suite of Unix document layout tools, tbl is a preprocessor that formats tables.Like the main troff program, tbl uses command lines interspersed with data to be printed...

, refer
Refer (software)
refer is a program for managing bibliographic references,and citing them in troff documents.It is implemented as a troff preprocessor.refer was written by Mike E...

, and the standard ms macro package, all for troff
Troff
troff is a document processing system developed by AT&T for the Unix operating system.-History:troff can trace its origins back to a text formatting program called RUNOFF, written by Jerome H. Saltzer for MIT's CTSS operating system in the mid-1960s...

), compiling (Lex programming tool
Lex programming tool
Lex is a computer program that generates lexical analyzers . Lex is commonly used with the yacc parser generator. Lex, originally written by Mike Lesk and Eric Schmidt, is the standard lexical analyzer generator on many Unix systems, and a tool exhibiting its behavior is specified as part of the...

), and networking (uucp
UUCP
UUCP is an abbreviation for Unix-to-Unix Copy. The term generally refers to a suite of computer programs and protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of files, email and netnews between computers. Specifically, a command named uucp is one of the programs in the suite; it...

), as well as the Portable I/O Library, the predecessor to stdio.h in C
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

. He also contributed significantly to the development of the C language preprocessor.

In the 1980s, Lesk worked on specific information systems applications, mostly with geography
Geography
Geography is the science that studies the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes...

 (a system for driving directions) and dictionaries
Dictionary
A dictionary is a collection of words in one or more specific languages, often listed alphabetically, with usage information, definitions, etymologies, phonetics, pronunciations, and other information; or a book of words in one language with their equivalents in another, also known as a lexicon...

 (a system for disambiguating words in context
Word sense disambiguation
In computational linguistics, word-sense disambiguation is an open problem of natural language processing, which governs the process of identifying which sense of a word is used in a sentence, when the word has multiple meanings...

), as well as running a research group at Bellcore (now Telcordia Technologies
Telcordia Technologies
Telcordia Technologies, formerly Bell Communications Research, Inc. or Bellcore, is a telecommunications research and development company based in the United States created as part of the 1982 Modification of Final Judgment that broke up American Telephone & Telegraph...

).

In the 1990s, Lesk worked on a large chemical information system, the CORE project, with Cornell
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

, Online Computer Library Center, American Chemical Society
American Chemical Society
The American Chemical Society is a scientific society based in the United States that supports scientific inquiry in the field of chemistry. Founded in 1876 at New York University, the ACS currently has more than 161,000 members at all degree-levels and in all fields of chemistry, chemical...

, and Chemical Abstracts Service
Chemical Abstracts Service
Chemical Abstracts is a periodical index that provides summaries and indexes of disclosures in recently published scientific documents. Approximately 8,000 journals, technical reports, dissertations, conference proceedings, and new books, in any of 50 languages, are monitored yearly, as are patent...

.

At the National Science Foundation
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...

, he administrated the Digital Library Initiative phase 1 (DLI-1, 1994–1997), which provided funding for Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

's research project in search engines that led to the foundation of Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

. From 1998 to 2002, Lesk headed NSF's Division of Information and Intelligent Systems. Currently, he is on the faculty of the Library and Information Science Department, School of Communication & Information, Rutgers University
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...

.

Lesk received the Flame award for lifetime achievement from Usenix
USENIX
-External links:* *...

 in 1994, is a Fellow of the ACM
Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...

, and in 2005 was elected to the National Academy of Engineering
National Academy of Engineering
The National Academy of Engineering is a government-created non-profit institution in the United States, that was founded in 1964 under the same congressional act that led to the founding of the National Academy of Sciences...

.

External links

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