Jacques Cohen (computer scientist)

Jacques Cohen, is a Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and of the Volen National Center for Complex Systems at Brandeis University. He served as the TJX/Feldberg Chair in Computer Science. All aspects of his field appeal to him, and he has performed research in algorithms, parsing and compiling, memory management, logic and constraint logic programming, and parallelism. With over 60 publications, Cohen has published extensively, often with undergraduate and graduate students.

Pioneering many aspects of modern computer science, Cohen's life work includes experimentation, education, and research, directed and carried out at many institutions of higher learning, including Brandeis University, Brown University, MIT, Wellesley College, and French universities in the cities of Marseilles, Grenoble, and Nancy.

In 1997, The Association for Logic Programming recognized Cohen as a pioneer in the field by bestowing him with the title of being one of the fifteen "Founders of Logic Programming."^[1]

Biography

Cohen was born in Brazil to immigrant parents: his mother came from Salonica, Greece, where a large Jewish community prospered before WWII; and his father was born and lived in Jerusalem, then under British mandate. His parents met while his mother was visiting a relative in Jerusalem. They migrated to Brazil shortly after their marriage, establishing themselves in the town of Belo Horizonte.

In Belo Horizonte, Cohen attended the local public high school and was admitted, after very competitive entrance examinations, to the Engineering School of the State University of Minas Geraes, the state whose capital is Belo. He graduated with a degree in Civil Engineering with highest honors, which included a medal for having attained the best grades awarded in the preceding several years. Shortly after his graduation, Cohen was granted a Brazilian government scholarship for pursuing graduate studies in the U.S.

At that time, Cohen decided to become a structural engineer and dreamt of building steel bridges and skyscrapers. For him, that meant assessing their soundness by performing sometimes-toilsome computations. In the mid fifties, Cohen made the decision to attend the Master’s program at the University of Florida, Gainesville.

Cohen continued his graduate work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he pursued a doctorate in Structural Design. His doctoral dissertation involved energy minimization using Raleigh-Ritz methods to determine Fourier series coefficients defining shapes of buckling columns made of thin-walled plates [Coh 60]. This particular topic enabled Cohen to learn a great deal of assembly language programming and the solution of systems of non-linear equations resulting from the energy minimization process.

Early career

After graduating from Illinois, Cohen returned to Brazil. There, he had another unique opportunity to work with early computers, this time with the Burroughs 205, a drum machine available at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. This machine was tricky to efficiently program since several copies of important data resided in what was called “fast memory.” Cohen did a great deal of programming using the Burroughs, ranging from operations research to simulation, to the design of reinforced concrete structures.

In the early sixties, Cohen obtained a summer position at the Bull computer company in Paris (also known as Groupe Bull) where he was associated with the operations research group. It was there that Cohen had his first experience in programming in Algol 60 running in the first French built machine and compiler. It consisted of developing a program for determining the maximal path in a graph using iterative methods. That program was to be used in scheduling industrial tasks.

Cohen was invited to participate as a researcher in the compiler group in the Applied Mathematics Institute at the University of Grenoble. He was hired as member of the National French Research Center (CNRS, in French), an institution that has associations with major French universities. Cohen’ research work in Grenoble was highly productive. The Applied Math Institute had been chosen as the center for developing the first full-fledged Algol 60 compiler in a French university.

As members of the compiler group, Cohen and his colleagues were encouraged to test the compiler being developed by writing all sorts of programs, especially recursive ones. It was in Grenoble that he became interested in syntax-directed compilers. It was a unique opportunity to participate in the meetings of the IFIP group that was then designing the successor of Algol 60. In the mid-sixties, Cohen had the opportunity to meet the leaders of language and compiler design, including Peter Naur, Edsger Dijkstra, Alan Perlis, John McCarthy, F. Bauer, Donald Knuth, Robert Floyd, Niklaus Wirth, and many others.

Using the Grenoble Algol 60, Cohen started developing many interesting programs, including a Lisp-embedding in Algol, all sorts of parsing algorithms, and a miniature Algol compiler written in Algol. Cohen’ doctoral dissertation in Grenoble [Coh 67a] was concerned with languages for writing compilers. This was in 1967, considerably before Yacc and Lex had been developed.

Cohen' French sojourn enabled him to work closely with many influential colleagues, such as Jean-Claude Boussard, Olivier Lecarme, Alain Colmerauer, Laurent Trilling, and Jean-Pierre Verjus.

Later career

After his time in France, Cohen was offered a research position in MIT’s Civil Engineering department, which he held for one year. In 1968, Cohen was offered an academic position at Brandeis University and has been associated with that university ever since.

As the founder of the Computer Science Department at Brandeis University, Cohen held the position of chair for almost a dozen years, beginning in the early 1980s. During his time as chair, he brought many grants to the department, from NSF grants to the CISE grant, which was given to the study of parallel algorithms.

During Cohen long academic career, some highlights include: being invited to teach a compiler course at Brown University for several years, as well as at MIT; being awarded a chair in Computer Science by the Feldberg family in association with their enterprises (Zayre and later TJMaxx); serving as the chairman of the Computer Science department for thirteen years; and finally being appointed as Editor-in-Chief of one of the most prestigious professional journals, the Communications of the ACM, where his tenure spanned for four years.

Recent Interests

Recent interests include computational biology (bioinformatics). This covers such subjects as grammars for gene finding, the inverse protein folding problem, and simulation and modeling of cell regulation.

Since retiring from academia in 2010, Jacques spends his days traveling with his wife, interacting with old friends, and concentrating on improving his violin skills.

References

http://jacquescohen.com.br

http://www.brandeis.edu/facultyguide/person.html?emplid=6f1fa165e7f1fc1ba82f2e9d1b6350a3aff453e8