Alan Curtis Kay (born May
17, 1940) is an American
computer scientist, known for his early
pioneering work on object-oriented programming and
windowing graphical user interface
design.He is the president of the Viewpoints
Research Institute, and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at
the University of California, Los
Angeles
. He is also on the advisory board of
TTI/Vanguard.
Until mid 2005, he was
a Senior Fellow at HP Labs, a Visiting
Professor at Kyoto
University
, and an
Adjunct Professor at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
(MIT).
Early life and work
Originally
from Springfield,
Massachusetts
, Kay attended the University of
Colorado at Boulder
, earning a Bachelor's
degree in Mathematics and Molecular Biology. Before and
during this time, he worked as a professional
jazz guitarist.
In 1966,
he began graduate school at the University of Utah
College of
Engineering, earning a Master's
degree and a Ph.D.
degree. There, he worked with
Ivan Sutherland, who had done pioneering
graphics programs including
Sketchpad.
This greatly inspired Kay's evolving views on objects and
programming. As he grew busier with
ARPA research, he
quit his career as a professional musician.
In 1968, he met
Seymour Papert and
learned of the
Logo
programming language, a
dialect of
Lisp optimized for
educational use. This led him to learn of the work
of
Jean Piaget,
Jerome Bruner,
Lev
Vygotsky, and of
Constructionist learning. These
further influenced his views.
In 1970,
Kay joined Xerox Corporation's Palo
Alto
Research Center, PARC
. In
the 1970s he was one of the key members there to develop prototypes
of networked workstations using the programming language
Smalltalk.
These inventions were later commercialized by
Apple
Computer
in their
Lisa and Macintosh computers.
Kay is one
of the fathers of the idea of object-oriented programming,
which he named, along with some colleagues at PARC and predecessors
at the Norwegian
Computing Center
. He conceived the
Dynabook concept which defined the conceptual
basics for
laptop and
tablet computers and
E-books, and is the architect of the modern
overlapping windowing
graphical
user interface (GUI). Because the Dynabook was conceived as an
educational platform, Kay is considered to be one of the first
researchers into
mobile learning,
and indeed, many features of the Dynabook concept have been adopted
in the design of the
One Laptop Per
Child educational platform, with which Kay is actively
involved.
After 10 years at Xerox PARC, Kay became
Atari's chief scientist for three years.
Recent work and recognition
Starting
in 1984, Kay was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer until the closing of the ATG (Advanced Technology Group), one of
the company's R&D divisions. He then joined
Walt Disney
Imagineering
as a Disney Fellow and
remained there until Disney ended its Disney Fellow program.
After Disney, in 2001 he founded
Viewpoints Research Institute,
a non-profit organization dedicated to children, learning, and
advanced software development.
Later, Kay worked with a team at
Applied
Minds, then became a Senior Fellow at
Hewlett-Packard until HP disbanded the
Advanced Software Research Team on July 20 2005. He is currently
head of Viewpoints Institute.
Squeak, Etoys, and Croquet
In December 1995, when he was still at Apple, Kay collaborated with
many others to start the open source
Squeak
dynamic media software, and he continues to work on it. As part of
this effort, in November 1996, his team began research on what
became the
Etoys
system. More recently he started, along with
David A. Smith,
David P. Reed,
Andreas Raab, Rick McGeer,
Julian
Lombardi, and
Mark McCahill, the
Croquet Project, which is an open
source networked 2D and 3D environment for collaborative
work.
Tweak
In 2001, it became clear that the Etoy architecture in Squeak had
reached its limits in what the Morphic interface infrastructure
could do. Andreas Raab was a researcher working in Kay's group,
then at Hewlett-Packard. He proposed defining a "script process"
and providing a default scheduling mechanism that avoids several
more general problems. The result was a new user interface,
proposed to replace the Squeak Morphic user interface in the
future.
Tweak added
mechanisms of islands, asynchronous messaging, players and
costumes, language extensions, projects, and tile scripting. Its
underlying object system is
class-based, but to users (during
programming) it acts like it is
prototype-based. Tweak objects
are created and run in Tweak project windows.
Children's Machine
In November 2005, at the
World Summit on the
Information Society, the MIT research laboratories unveiled a
new laptop computer, for educational use around the world. It has
many names: the $100 Laptop, the
One Laptop per Child program, the
Children's Machine, and the
XO-1. The
program was begun and is sustained by Kay's friend,
Nicholas Negroponte, and is based on
Kay's
Dynabook ideal. Kay is a prominent
co-developer of the computer, focusing on its educational software
using Squeak and Etoys.
Reinventing programming
Kay has lectured extensively on the idea that the Computer
Revolution is very new, and all of the good ideas have not been
universally implemented. Lectures at OOPSLA 1997 conference and his
ACM Turing award talk, entitled "The Computer Revolution Hasn't
Happened Yet" were informed by his experiences with
Sketchpad,
Simula,
Smalltalk, and the bloated code of commercial
software.
On 31
August 2006, Kay's proposal to the United States National
Science Foundation, NSF, was granted, thus funding Viewpoints Research Institute
for several years. The proposal title is: Steps Toward the
Reinvention of Programming: A compact and Practical Model of
Personal Computing as a Self-exploratorium . A sense of what Kay is
trying to do comes from this quote, from the abstract of a seminar
on this given at Intel Research Labs, Berkeley: "The conglomeration
of commercial and most open source software consumes in the
neighborhood of several hundreds of millions of lines of code these
days. We wonder: how small could be an understandable practical
"Model T" design that covers this functionality? 1M lines of code?
200K LOC? 100K LOC? 20K LOC?"
The system being developed makes extensive use of
parsing via a
bottom up rewrite
grammar.
Awards and honors
Alan Kay has received many awards and honors. Among them:
Other honors: J-D Warnier Prix d’Informatique, ACM Systems Software
Award, NEC Computers & Communication Foundation Prize, Funai
Foundation Prize, Lewis Branscomb Technology Award, ACM SIGCSE
Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science
Education.
Personal background
Kay is an avid and skilled
musician who
plays
keyboard instruments and
guitar. He has a special interest in early
keyboard instruments like the
baroque
pipe organ and old guitars. He was a
former professional jazz and
rock and
roll guitarist. He is married to
Bonnie MacBird, a
writer,
actress,
artist and
television
producer who shares his passion for music.
References
Articles
External links
, Germany
for pioneering the GUI; J-D
Warnier Prix D'Informatique; NEC C&C Prize.
.
.
.
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