Gerald Jay Sussman is
the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT). He received his S.B. and Ph.D. degrees
in mathematics from MIT in 1968 and 1973, respectively. He has been
involved in artificial intelligence research at MIT since 1964. His
research has centered on understanding the problem-solving strategies
used by scientists and engineers, with the goals of automating parts
of the process and formalizing it to provide more effective methods of
science and engineering education. Sussman has also worked in computer
languages, in computer architecture and in VLSI design.
Academic work
Sussman is a coauthor (with Hal Abelson and Julie Sussman) of the
introductory computer science textbook used at MIT. This textbook,
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, has been translated
into several languages.
Sussman's contributions to artificial intelligence include problem
solving by debugging almost-right plans, propagation of constraints
applied to electrical circuit analysis and synthesis, dependency-based
explanation and dependency-based backtracking, and various language
structures for expressing problem-solving strategies. Sussman and his
former student, Guy L. Steele Jr., invented the Scheme programming
language in 1975.
Sussman saw that artificial intelligence ideas can be applied to
computer-aided design. Sussman developed, with his graduate students,
sophisticated computer-aided design tools for VLSI. Steele made the
first Scheme chips in 1978. These ideas and the AI-based CAD
technology to support them were further developed in the Scheme chips
of 1979 and 1981. The technique and experience developed was then used
to design other special-purpose computers. Sussman was the principal
designer of the Digital Orrery, a machine designed to do
high-precision integrations for orbital mechanics experiments. The
Orrery was designed and built by a few people in a few months, using
AI-based simulation and compilation tools.
Using the Digital Orrery, Sussman has worked with Jack Wisdom to
discover numerical evidence for chaotic motions in the outer planets.
The Digital Orrery is now retired at the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington, DC. Sussman was also the lead designer of the
Supercomputer Toolkit, another multiprocessor computer optimized for
evolving systems of ordinary differential equations. The Supercomputer
Toolkit was used by Sussman and Wisdom to confirm and extend the
discoveries made with the Digital Orrery to include the entire
planetary system.
Sussman has pioneered the use of computational descriptions to
communicate methodological ideas in teaching subjects in Electrical
Circuits and in Signals and Systems. Over the past decade Sussman and
Wisdom have developed a subject that uses computational techniques to
communicate a deeper understanding of advanced classical mechanics. In
Computer Science: Reflections on the Field, Reflections from the
Field, he writes "...computational algorithms are used to express the
methods used in the analysis of dynamical phenomena. Expressing the
methods in a computer language forces them to be unambiguous and
computationally effective. Students are expected to read the programs
and to extend them and to write new ones. The task of formulating a
method as a computer-executable program and debugging that program is
a powerful exercise in the learning process. Also, once formalized
procedurally, a mathematical idea becomes a tool that can be used
directly to compute results." Sussman and Wisdom, with Meinhard Mayer,
have produced a textbook, Structure and Interpretation of Classical
Mechanics, to capture these new ideas.
Sussman and Abelson also have been an important part of the Free
Software Movement, including serving on the Board of Directors of the
Free Software Foundation,[1] and releasing MIT/GNU Scheme as free
software even before the Free Software Foundation existed.
Awards and organizations
For his contributions to computer-science education, Sussman received
the ACM's Karl Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award in 1990, and the
Amar G. Bose award for teaching in 1991.
Sussman and Richard Stallman are the only founding directors still
active on the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation
(FSF).
Sussman is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers (IEEE), a member of the National Academy of Engineering
(NAE), a fellow of the American Association for Artificial
Intelligence (AAAI), a fellow of the Association for Computing
Machinery (ACM), a fellow of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science (AAAS), a fellow of the New York Academy of
Sciences (NYAS), and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences. He is also a bonded locksmith, a life member of the American
Watchmakers-Clockmakers Institute (AWI), a member of the Massachusetts
Watchmakers-Clockmakers Association (MWCA), a member of the Amateur
Telescope Makers of Boston (ATMOB), and a member of the American Radio
Relay League (ARRL).
See also
Marvin Minsky
Seymour Papert
Terry Winograd
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