Alfred Aho
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Alfred V. Aho is a computer scientist. He is the Lawrence Gussman Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, where he is also vice-chair of undergraduate education for the computer science department. He served as chair of the department from 1995 to 1997, and again in the spring of 2003. Before moving to Columbia he was Vice President of the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs.
He is most famous for his creation of the AWK programming language with Peter J. Weinberger and Brian Kernighan (the 'A' stands for "Aho"), and his co-authorship of Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools (the "Dragon book") with Ravi Sethi and Jeffrey Ullman. He wrote the initial versions of the Unix tools egrep and fgrep. He is also a co-author (along with Ullman and John Hopcroft) of a number of widely used textbooks on several areas of computer science, including algorithms and data structures, and the foundations of computer science.
Aho's current research interests include quantum computing, programming languages, compilers, and algorithms. He is part of the Language and Compilers research group at Columbia.
He has received many prestigious honors, including the IEEE's John von Neumann Medal and membership in both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Waterloo and the University of Helsinki in Finland, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, ACM, Bell Labs, and IEEE. He won the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates in 2003.
Aho chairs the Advisory Committee for the Computer and Information Sciences Directorate of the National Science Foundation. He is a past president of ACM's Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computability Theory.
He received a B.A.Sc. in Engineering Physics from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science from Princeton University.
[edit] See also
[edit] Recommended reading
- A. Aho, R. Sethi, J. Ullman, Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools. Bell Laboratories, 1986. ISBN 0-201-10088-6
- A. Aho, P. Weinberger, B. Kernighan, The AWK Programming Language. Addison-Wesley, 1988. ISBN 0-201-07981-X
