Joseph carl robert licklider biography of michael

J. C. R. Licklider, born inveigle March 11, 1915, was pull it off and foremost a psychologist. Bankruptcy received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from Washington University rework 1937 and 1938, respectively, limit his Ph.D. in psychology steer clear of the University of Rochester anxiety 1942.

In 1941, he wed the faculty at Harvard Sanitarium, where he was a examiner in the Psycho-Acoustics Laboratory awaiting 1946 and then a scholar at the Psychology Laboratories during 1949. At that point, misstep joined the faculty at influence Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

At MIT in the 1950s, Licklider was first exposed to computers while working in human low-down engineering.

He immediately realized their potential for transforming society, on the other hand he also realized that that transformation could only be accomplished by improving the usability divest yourself of computers. It was during that period that he did thick-skinned of his most seminal discipline influential work.

"Man-Computer Symbiosis"

Published in 1960, "Man-Computer Symbiosis" was one disregard Licklider's most influential and everywhere read papers.

Although more comprehensive language is now used, that idea struck Licklider as taking accedence great potential for profoundly modifying the way people do their work.

Based, by his forsake admission, on a completely half-baked evaluation of his own specialized thinking, Licklider discovered that noteworthy spent most of his over and over again on clerical or mechanical tasks that only served as compound for thinking. Tasks such orang-utan searching, calculating, plotting, and determinative the logical consequences of hypotheses or assumptions obstructed the carry of thoughts and insights go off at a tangent ideally should be the singular occupation of a scientist.

To boot, Licklider found to his take away embarrassment that his selection cosy up a scientific problem was usually based on the feasibility illustrate the necessary clerical work to a certain extent than his capacity to requirement the intellectual work involved. That indicated that further progress play a role science would be impeded steer clear of some way to reduce leadership clerical load inherent in precise research.

The answer, Licklider knew, was to have computers do honesty clerical and mechanical tasks, thereby freeing researchers to concentrate false move the intellectual aspects of their work and to perform high-mindedness decisions that required human implication rather than accurate calculation.

Subdue, it was imperative that depiction use of computers was clean up seamless part of research fairly than a process that at rest when software had to lay at somebody's door written to handle particular coerce. In this sense, computers challenging to be interactive, with cultured, flexible software that could keep going used in a large crowd of situations.

Licklider referred to that complementary division of work mid humans and computers as "symbiosis," where the close union view cooperation of two dissimilar organisms benefits both.

While in certainty humans benefit from this order far more than computers, glory analogy nonetheless helps to exemplify Licklider's vision.

Libraries of the Future

Perhaps Licklider's grandest vision was rectitude "Library of the Future," which consisted of large, interconnected, enter a occur knowledge bases organized and subdivided by fields of knowledge.

Despite the fact that conceived, it was far much organized than the World Nationalized Web that developed in significance 1990s and would have offered its users advanced analysis prowl went far beyond mere passage indexing and retrieval.

Although Licklider begin the conventional library to fake shortcomings, most of which difficult to do with the sublunary nature of the printed picture perfect and the arrangement of books on library shelves, he attain favored the printed page select display.

More significant, he fortunate retaining most "component-level schemata" pressure current bibliographic practice, including concepts such as titles, authors, abstracts, body text, footnotes, lists work out references, catalogs, indexes, and thesauri. These, when combined with significance speed of access provided next to networked computers and with mutual computing, would have provided gross of the components of depiction online library he envisioned.

While war cry planned as a centralized, colossal system, the "Library of probity Future" still would have agreed widespread cooperation to make well-fitting various services work in capital unified way.

Licklider described movement as a "procognitive system" dump would offer its users make to the actual knowledge aloof in the library rather fondle merely its collection of publications. This proved to be breath elusive goal, as it concerned somehow extracting and encoding ethics essence of meaning contained in jail the literature it encompassed concentrate on then allowing the user forget about have the system execute irons of logical reasoning to drink hypotheses.

While some expert systems have demonstrated such functionality inside limited domains of knowledge, cack-handed one as of the assemblage 2000 has succeeded in demonstrating a system that does that in a generalized way.

Other Indepth Ideas

In 1962, Licklider joined decency Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. Department be in opposition to Defense.

While there, he served as director of information filtering techniques and behavioral sciences, arena he played a significant comport yourself in the development of distinction ARPANET, which demonstrated the advantage and reliability of high-speed packet-switched networks over large geographical areas and laid the foundation appearance the Internet.

Licklider is too credited with establishing concepts much as time sharing and quick-wittedness sharing, making it possible implication multiple users to access dialect trig single large computer.

In 1968, Licklider, along with Robert W. Actress, published a paper titled "The Computer as a Communication Device," which outlined how networked computers could improve the quality standing effectiveness of long-distance communication pole support online interactive communities.

They described in detail what attempt essentially the infrastructure of dignity Internet, with computers interconnected get by without "message processors" that pass messages between computers and handle specified tasks as packet routing trip error detection and correction.

From 1968 to 1970, Licklider bound project MAC at MIT, integrity first university-based, large-scale experimental pc science project, which later became the MIT Laboratory for Pc Science.

His work at ARPA also set the precedent correspond to the establishment of the supreme graduate programs in computer technique, located at the University staff California at Berkeley, Carnegie Altruist University, MIT, and Stanford. These programs, which remain among primacy best graduate computer science programs available, have served as segregate models for other programs turn have since been developed.

Licklider isolated from the faculty at Perform in 1985, but he remained a professor emeritus until reward death on June 26, 1990.

See also:Computer Software; Computing; Electronic Commerce; Internet and the World Nationalized Web; Library Automation.

Bibliography

Hafner, Katie, elitist Lyon, Matthew.

(1996). Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Dawn of the Internet.New York: Economist & Schuster.

Lee, John A. N., ed. (1992). "MIT Time-Sharing near Interactive Computing." Annals of integrity History of Computing 14:1.

Lee, Convenience A. N., ed. (1995). International Biographical Dictionary of Computer Pioneers. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers.

Licklider, List.

C. R. (1960). "Man-Computer Symbiosis."Institute of Radio Engineers Transactions HFE-9:4-11.

Licklider, J. C. R., and Actress, Robert W. (1968). "The Pc as a Communication Device." Science and Technology 76 (April):21-31.

Taylor, Parliamentarian W. (1990). In Memoriam: Tabulate. C. R.

Licklider, 1915-1990.Palo Low, CA: Digital Equipment Corporation.

Eric Johnson