Carl Hewitt

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

[edit] Academic work

He is known for his design of Planner, which was the first Artificial Intelligence programming language based on procedural plans that were invoked using pattern-directed invocation from assertions and goals. Hewitt (whose 1971 dissertation in mathematics committee was Marvin Minsky, Seymour Papert (supervisor) 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 who advocated expressing knowledge declaratively in mathematical 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, Eugene Charniak's natural language story understanding work and a couple of other projects.

Using program schemas in collaboration with Mike Paterson, Hewitt proved that recursion is more powerful than iteration and that parallelism is more powerful than recursion. In collaboration with Henry Baker, he published physical laws for computation which they then used to derive the continuity criterion for computable functions of Dana Scott. Using participatory semantics, he proved that coroutines are more powerful than recursion and that concurrency is more powerful than parallel coroutines.

Hewitt and his students and colleagues are also known for their work on the Actor model. Actors are universal primitives of concurrent computation. The Actor work built on Lisp, Simula, capability-based systems, packet switching and early versions of Smalltalk.

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

Subsequently Hewitt has worked to integrate sociology, anthropology, organization science, the philosophy of science, and services science into information science.

He is also working on massive concurrency, the subject of a May 2005 seminar at Stanford and an October 2005 seminar at Berkeley.

[edit] References

• Manuel Blum and Carl Hewitt. Automata on a 2-Dimensional Tape FOCS 1967.
• Carl Hewitt. PLANNER: A Language for Proving Theorems in Robots IJCAI. 1969.
• Mike Paterson and Carl Hewitt. Comparative Schematology MIT AI Memo 201. August 1970.
• Carl Hewitt. Procedural Embedding of Knowledge In Planner IJCAI. 1971.
• Carl Hewitt. Description and Theoretical Analysis (Using Schemata) of Planner, A Language for Proving Theorems and Manipulating Models in a Robot AI Memo No. 251, MIT Project MAC. April 1972.
• Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop and Richard Steiger. A Universal Modular Actor Formalism for Artificial Intelligence IJCAI. 1973.
• Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop, Irene Greif, Brian Smith, Todd Matson, Richard Steiger. Actor Induction and Meta-Evaluation POPL January 1974.
• Carl Hewitt, et. al. Behavioral semantics of nonrecursive control structures Symposium on Programming. 1974.
• Carl Hewitt and Henry Baker Actors and Continuous Functionals Proceeding of IFIP Working Conference on Formal Description of Programming Concepts. August 1–5, 1977.
• Henry Baker and Carl Hewitt The Incremental Garbage Collection of Processes Proceeding of the Symposium on Artificial Intelligence Programming Languages. SIGPLAN Notices 12, August, 1977.
• Carl Hewitt and Russ Atkinson. Specification and Proof Techniques for Serializers IEEE Journal on Software Engineering. January, 1979.
• Carl Hewitt, Beppe Attardi, and Henry Lieberman. Delegation in Message Passing Proceedings of First International Conference on Distributed Systems Huntsville, AL. October, 1979.
• Carl Hewitt. Viewing Control Structures as Patterns of Passing Messages Journal of Artificial Intelligence. June, 1977.
• William Kornfeld and Carl Hewitt. The Scientific Community Metaphor MIT AI Memo 641. January, 1981.
• Henry Lieberman and Carl Hewitt. A real Time Garbage Collector Based on the Lifetimes of Objects CACM. June, 1983.
• Carl Hewitt and Peter de Jong. Analyzing the Roles of Descriptions and Actions in Open Systems Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. August 1983.
• Henry Lieberman and Carl Hewitt. Design Issues in Parallel Architectures for Artificial Intelligence IEEE CompCon Conference, March 1984.
• Carl Hewitt. The Challenge of Open Systems Byte Magazine. April 1985. Reprinted in The foundation of artificial intelligence---a sourcebook Cambridge University Press. 1990.
• Carl Hewitt. Towards Open Information Systems Semantics Proceedings of 10th International Workshop on Distributed Artificial Intelligence. October 23–27, 1990. Bandera, Texas.
• Carl Hewitt. Open Information Systems Semantics Journal of Artificial Intelligence. January 1991.
• Carl Hewitt and Gul Agha. Guarded Horn clause languages: are they deductive and Logical? International Conference on Fifth Generation Computer Systems, Ohmsha 1988. Tokyo. Also in Artificial Intelligence at MIT, Vol. 2. MIT Press 1991.
• Carl Hewitt and Carl Manning. Negotiation Architecture for Large-Scale Crisis Management AAAI-94 Workshop on Models of Conflict Management in Cooperative Problem Solving. Seattle, WA. August 4, 1994.
• Carl E. Hewitt. From Contexts to Negotiation Forums AAAI Symposium on Formalizing Context. November 10–11, 1995. Cambridge Mass.
• Carl Hewitt and Carl Manning. Synthetic Infrastructures for Multi-Agency Systems Proceedings of ICMAS '96. Kyoto, Japan. December 8–13, 1996.
• Carl Hewitt (2006a). The repeated demise of logic programming and why it will be reincarnated What Went Wrong and Why: Lessons from AI Research and Applications. Technical Report SS-06-08. AAAI Press. March 2006.
• Carl Hewitt (2006b) What is Commitment? Physical, Organizational, and Social COIN@AAMAS. April 27, 2006.

[edit] External links

• This DBLP bibliography has some additional bibliographic entries for Carl Hewitt.
• Future and Recent Hewitt seminars.