Hewitt obtained his PhD in mathematics at MIT in 1971, under the supervision of Seymour Papert, Marvin Minsky, and Mike Paterson.
Work on Planner
The Planner language was developed as part of Hewitt's doctoral research in MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Hewitt's work on Planner introduced the notion of the "procedural embedding of knowledge",[11] which was an alternative to the logical approach to knowledge encoding for artificial intelligence pioneered by John McCarthy.[12] A subset of Planner called Micro Planner was implemented by Gerry Sussman, Eugene Charniak and Terry Winograd.[13] It was used in Winograd's famous SHRDLU program, [14] Charniak's natural language story understanding work, [15] and L. Thorne McCarty's work on legal reasoning. [16]
Work on the Actor model
The Actor model was the original inspiration for Sussman and Steele's work on the Scheme programming language,[17] and also provided the motivation for the development of a number of languages specifically intended to implement the Actor model, such as ACT-1,[18]SALSA,[19] Caltrop,[20] and E.[6] Hewitt's work on the Actor model of computation has spanned over 30 years, beginning with the introduction of the model in a 1973 paper authored by Hewitt, Peter Bishop, and Richard Steiger,[21] and including new results on Actor model semantics published as recently as 2006.[22] Much of this work was carried out in collaboration with students in Hewitt's Message Passing Semantics Group at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab.[23]
MIT career
He retired from the faculty of the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science during the 1999-2000 school year.[24] Among the doctoral students that Hewitt supervised during his time at MIT are Professor Gul Agha, Dr. Russell Atkinson, Dr. Henry Baker, Dr. Gerald Barber, Dr. Peter Bishop, Dr. Gene Ciccarelli, Professor William Clinger, Dr. Peter de Jong, Dr. Michael Freiling, Dr. Irene Greif, Dr. Kenneth Kahn, Dr. William Kornfeld and Professor Akinori Yonezawa.[25]
Awards
From September 1989 to August 1990, Hewitt was the IBM Chair Visiting Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Keio University in Japan.[26]
Carl Hewitt (1985). The Challenge of Open Systems Byte Magazine. April 1985. (Reprinted in The foundation of artificial intelligence--a sourcebook Cambridge University Press. 1990)
^ Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert. “Progress Report on Artificial Intelligence” MIT AI Memo 252. 1971.
^ L. Thorne McCarty. "Reflections on TAXMAN: An Experiment on Artificial Intelligence and Legal Reasoning" Harvard Law Review. Vol. 90, No. 5, March 1977