Michael E. Lesk is a computer programmer.
In the 1960s, Michael Lesk worked for the SMART Information Retrieval System project, wrote much of its retrieval code and did many of the retrieval experiments, as well as obtaining a PhD in Chemical Physics.
In the 1970s, he worked at Bell Labs, in the group that built Unix. Lesk wrote Unix tools for word processing (tbl, refer, and the standard ms macro package, all for troff), for compiling (Lex), and for networking (uucp). He also wrote the Portable I/O Library (the predecessor to stdio.h in C) and contributed significantly to the development of the C language preprocessor.[1]
In the 1980s, Lesk worked on specific information systems applications, mostly with geography (a system for driving directions) and dictionaries (a system for disambiguating words in context), as well as running a research group at Bellcore (now Telcordia Technologies).
In the 1990s, Lesk worked on a large chemical information system, the CORE project, with Cornell, Online Computer Library Center, American Chemical Society, and Chemical Abstracts Service.
At the National Science Foundation, he administrated the Digital Library Initiative phase 1 (DLI-1, 1994–1997), which provided funding for Stanford University's research project in search engines that led to the foundation of Google. From 1998 to 2002, Lesk headed NSF's Division of Information and Intelligent Systems. Currently, he is on the faculty of the Library and Information Science Department, School of Communication & Information, Rutgers University.
Lesk received the Flame award for lifetime achievement from Usenix in 1994, is a Fellow of the ACM, and in 2005 was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
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