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Biography
Alfred V. Aho is the Lawrence Gussman Professor of Computer Science and Vice
Chair for Undergraduate Education in the Computer Science Department at Columbia
University. He served as Chair of the department from 1995 to 1997, and in the
spring of 2003. Professor Aho has a B.A.Sc in Engineering Physics from the
University of Toronto and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science
from Princeton University.
Professor Aho won the Great Teacher Award for 2003 from the Society of Columbia
Graduates. He has won the IEEE John von Neumann Medal and is a Member of the
U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences. He received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Helsinki and
Waterloo, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, ACM, Bell Labs, and IEEE.
Professor Aho is well known for his many books on algorithms and data
structures, programming languages, compilers, and the foundations of computer
science. His coauthors include John Hopcroft, Brian Kernighan, Monica Lam, Ravi
Sethi, Jeff Ullman, and Peter Weinberger. Professor Aho is the "A" in AWK, a
widely used pattern-matching language. "W" is Peter Weinberger and "K" is Brian
Kernighan. (Think of AWK as the initial pure version of perl.) He also wrote the
initial versions of the string pattern-matching programs egrep and fgrep that
first appeared on UNIX.
Professor Aho's current research interests include programming languages,
compilers, algorithms, and quantum computing. Professor Aho was Chair of ACM's
Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computability Theory, and is currently
Chair of the Advisory Committee for the National Science Foundation Computer and
Information Science and Engineering Directorate.
Prior to his current position at Columbia, Professor Aho was Vice President of
the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs, the lab that invented UNIX,
C and C++. Previously, he was a member of technical staff, department head, and
director of this center. Professor Aho was also the General Manager of the
Information Sciences and Technologies Research Laboratory at Bellcore (now
Telcordia).
Professor Aho plays bridge, golf, and the violin in a string quartet. He likes
skiing on soft snow.
This year, professor Aho received a Phoenix Direct Funding Award for his project
Phoenix Meets Dragon. Read more about professor Aho’s research by selecting a
project above. |
DR.
ALFRED AHO