Yale University

Department of Computer Science

Alan J. Perlis Symposium

• Symposium History

• Past Symposia

Alan J. Perlis, Eugene Higgins Professor of Computer Science, had a long and distinguished career in computer science. A member of the Yale faculty since 1971, he was noted for his work in the design of programming languages and the development of programming techniques. He served as the Department's chairman in 1976-77 and 1978-80, and as acting chairman in 1987.

While at Yale he assumed major responsibility for developing and teaching introductory computer science courses as well as graduate courses in programming languages and systems.

Before coming to Yale, Perlis was Professor of Computer Science and Mathematicsat the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University. In 1965 the graduate Department of Computer Science was founded at Carnegie and he became its first head.

In 1966, Perlis was the first recipient of the A.M. Turing Award, the Association of Computing Machinery's highest honor, for his research and scholarship in the field. He was also a recipient of the American Federation of Information Processing Education Award, and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.

The first symposium was held in 1992 and was largely funded by the John Wick Fund. John Wick was a former student of Professor Perlis' who died at an early age, initiated the fund with a bequest to be used in Alan's honor.

This symposium was titled Parallel Computers of the Future. Speakers were Arvind of the Massachusetts Instutite of Technology, who spoke on Data flow Architectues From Monsoon to *T, Wolfgang Paul of the University of Saarbruecken whose talk was titled Theory, Physical Design, and Application, and H.T. Kung of Carnegie Mellon and Harvard Universities, Will parallel Architecutes Converge?

The symposium was a great success and in the following years the department continued to offer the symposium and it is now a tradition. In the following years many topics have been covered with many well known, talented people from many areas of education and industry. These people have helped the symposium's continued success.