Saul Amarel

Saul Amarel (born January 1, 1928 in Thessaloniki , † December 18, 2002 in Princeton (New Jersey) ) was an Israeli-American computer scientist who dealt with Artificial Intelligence (AI).

He came from a family of Talmudic scholars in Greece. During World War II he was in the Greek resistance and fled to Gaza with his family. He fought in the Israeli War of Independence in 1948 and studied at the Technion with a bachelor's degree as an engineer in 1948. After serving in the army, he studied electrical engineering at Columbia University with a master's degree in 1953 and a doctorate in 1955. He headed the research group from 1958 to 1969 in theoretical computer science at the RCA Sarnoff Labs. At that time he was engaged in network synthesis and computer simulation. He was a professor at Rutgers University from 1969 , where he founded the computer science department at Livingston College and headed it until 1984. From 1985 to 1988 he headed the IT department at DARPA . In 1988, he returned to Rutgers University as a Turing Professor and led a $ 12.4 million Department of Defense program using AI to design VLSI circuits, ships, speech recognition systems, aircraft, and more.

With a work from 1968, he was considered one of the pioneers of AI. In it he deals with the classic riddle of the three missionaries who are supposed to bring three cannibals across the river in a boat without ever facing a majority of the cannibals (cannibals problem). It was less about the (well-known) solution than about the question of how a computer should approach the problem that does not just try all cases, but uses similar conclusions as humans. The article also highlighted the importance of knowledge representations. In the 1970s he dealt with expert systems and their application in biomedicine (e.g. for diagnoses).

In 1977 he founded the Laboratory for Computer Science Research at Rutgers University, which introduced time-sharing to the university and was an early node of the Arpanet .

In 1983 he chaired the IJCAI conference in Karlsruhe. In 1998 he received the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award . In 1994 he became a Fellow of the IEEE .

Fonts

On representations of problems of reasoning about actions, Machine Intelligence, Volume 3, 1968, pp. 131-171

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Amarel, Saul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Israeli-American computer scientist
DATE OF BIRTH	January 1, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH	Thessaloniki
DATE OF DEATH	December 18, 2002
Place of death	Princeton, New Jersey