Allen Newell

Allen Newell (March 19, 1927 – July 19, 1992) was an American researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department of Psychology. He, Herbert A. Simon, and Cliff Shaw contributed to the Information Processing Language and two of the earliest AI programs, the Logic Theorist (1956) and the General Problem Solver (1957). He and Simon were awarded the ACM Turing Award in 1975 for their contributions to artificial intelligence and the psychology of human cognition.

Early studies Newell completed his bachelor's degree in physics from Stanford in 1949. He was a graduate student at Princeton University from 1949 to 1950, where he studied mathematics. Due to his early exposure to an unknown field known as game theory and the experiences from the study of mathematics, he was convinced that he would prefer a combination of experimental and theoretical research to pure mathematics.

In 1950, he left Princeton and joined the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica where he worked for "a group that was studying logistics problems of the Air Force".

Artificial intelligence In September 1954, Newell enrolled in a seminar where Oliver Selfridge "described a running computer program that learned to recognize letters and other patterns". (see notes), the Logic Theorist. Newell's work on the program laid the foundations of the field. His inventions included: list processing, the most important programming paradigm used by AI ever since; the application of means-ends analysis to general reasoning (or "reasoning as search"); and the use of heuristics to limit the search space.

They presented the program at the Dartmouth conference of 1956, an informal gathering of researchers who were interested in simulating intelligence with machines. The conference, now widely considered the "birth of artificial intelligence", was enormously influential and those who attended became the leaders of AI research for the next two decades, Newell included.

Later achievements Newell and Simon formed a lasting partnership. They founded an artificial intelligence laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University and produced a series of important programs and theoretical insights throughout the late fifties and sixties. This work included the General Problem Solver, a highly influential implementation of means–ends analysis, and the physical symbol systems hypothesis, the controversial philosophical assertion that all intelligent behavior could be reduced to the kind of symbol manipulation that Newell's programs demonstrated.

Newell's work culminated in the development of a cognitive architecture known as Soar and his unified theory of cognition, published in 1990, but their improvement was the objective of his efforts up to his death (one of the last Newell's letters ). The field of cognitive architectures, that he initiated, is still active in both the artificial intelligence and computational cognitive science communities.

Awards and honors 1971 — John Danz Lecturer, University of Washington 1971 — Harry Goode Memorial Award, American Federation of Information Processing Societies 1972 — Elected to member of the United States National Academy of Sciences 1972 — Elected to Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1975 — A. M. Turing Award (with Herbert A. Simon), Association for Computing Machinery 1976–77 — Guggenheim Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation 1979 — Alexander C. Williams Jr. Award (with William C. Biel, Robert Chapman and John L. Kennedy), Human Factors Society 1980 — Elected to member of the United States National Academy of Engineering 1980 — First President, American Association for Artificial Intelligence 1981 — Charter recipient of the Computer Pioneer Award from the IEEE Computer Society 1985 — Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, American Psychological Association 1986 — Doctor of Science (Honorary), University of Pennsylvania 1987 — William James Lectures, Harvard University 1989 — Award for Research Excellence, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 1989 — Doctor in the Behavioral and Social Sciences (Honorary), University of Groningen, The Netherlands 1989 — William James Fellow Award (charter recipient), American Psychological Society 1990 — IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award 1990 — IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize Paper Award 1990 — Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence 1992 — U.S. National Medal of Science 1992 — The Franklin Institute's Louis E. Levy Medal

The ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award was named in his honor. The Award for Research Excellence of the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science was also named in his honor.