Fwd: News about our colleague Carl Hewitt

[Mark S. Miller]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Henry Lieberman <he...@csail.mit.edu>
Date: Thu, Jan 12, 2023 at 2:51 PM
Subject: News about our colleague Carl Hewitt
To: Ken Kahn <toon...@gmail.com>, Ken Forbus <for...@northwestern.edu>, <ste...@arti.vub.ac.be>, <wi...@ccs.neu.edu>, <ag...@illinois.edu>, <yone...@s.u-tokyo.ac.jp>, <yone...@stair.center>, Giuseppe Attardi <att...@di.unipi.it>, <ma...@di.unipi.it>, <mlmi...@learningtech.org>, Margaret Minsky <margare...@gmail.com>, Henry Lieberman <lie...@media.mit.edu>, <ma...@mt.cs.keio.ac.jp>, <m...@alum.mit.edu>, <eri...@gmail.com>, <rweyh...@yahoo.com>, <erik.sa...@liu.se>, <stenake.@gmail.com>, <bu...@staffmail.ed.ac.uk>, <alan...@squeakland.org>, <Korn...@netcom.com>, <candy....@alum.mit.edu>, <dmcd...@sift.net>, <un...@mac.com>, <riss...@cs.umass.edu>, <gloria_...@brookline.met.edu>, Jean-Pierre Briot <jean-pie...@lip6.fr>, <pierre...@emn.fr>, <jeanpier...@icloud.com>, <Jbra...@ihmc.us>, Lucia Maria Vaina <va...@bu.edu>, <lan...@isle.org>, Richard Greenblatt <rdgr...@verizon.net>, Terry Winograd <wino...@cs.stanford.edu>

     Dear MIT community,

     It is with sadness that I have to report the death of our dear
colleague Professor Emeritus Carl Hewitt.  He died a few weeks ago of
complications of a fall where he hit his head and suffered a traumatic
brain injury that affected other body systems.

     Carl was a professor at the MIT AI Lab (now CSAIL) from about 1971
to 2000. He had an enormous impact on the fields of Artificial
Intelligence, Programming Languages, Distributed Computing, Parallel
Computing, and others. Carl's signature achivement is his invention of
the Actor model of computation. I worked with Carl from about 1973 to
1987 on Actors. Actors are a radical rethinking of computation as
universal objects containing both procedures and data, and that
communicate via message passing. It was one of the origins of today's
object-oriented programming, and is still the best (IMHO) way to think
about parallel computation.  Recent trends in hardware and software are
bearing this out. His PhD thesis with Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert
was on Planner, the first pattern-directed invocation language, which
led to logic programming and modern AI planning. His recent work treated
the thorny problem of robustness in the face of inconsistency, and in
security for the Internet of Things (IoT).

     A memorial will be held at Benito and Azzaro Pacific Gardens
Chapel, 1050 Cayuga St., Santa Cruz CA, on January 14, 2023 at 4pm PT,
followed by a zoom reception at 8:30pm ET/5:30pm PT, ID: 1601151983.
Donations to defray the expense of Carl's passing can be sent to Fanya
S. Montalvo, at P.O. Box 880, Aptos CA 95001. Stay tuned for news about
a future event celebrating his academic legacy.

     Henry Lieberman

--

  Cheers,
  --MarkM