BERKELEY

Robert Wilensky, professor emeritus of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the campuss first faculty members in artificial intelligence when the field was just taking off, has died at age 61.

Robert Wilensky (Peg Skorpinski photo)

He died at the Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Oakland on Friday, March 15, of a bacterial infection.

Wilenskys career at UC Berkeley spanned nearly 30 years, beginning in 1978 when he joined the faculty in computer science. He later was appointed a professor at the School of Information and Management Sciences (now the School of Information, or I School), which he helped form.

His many research interests included the role of memory processes in natural language processing, language analysis and production and artificial intelligence in programming languages.

One of Wilenskys most notable contributions to the university was the UC Berkeley Digital Library Project, launched in the early years of the World Wide Web to develop techniques to make books and research materials from any library available online. The project also linked technical material together so that different layers of information can be selectively displayed and linked to other documents. This has become commonplace on the Web and in tools like Google Earth.

The system allowed scholars and researchers to add material, and it enabled general users to easily find and retrieve information, including environmental reports, historic photos, video files, maps, databases of California flora and more, said David Culler, professor and chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. These are conveniences we now take for granted.

The UC Berkeley Digital Library was launched in 1994 with a $4 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and NASA. Two years later, the project got a big boost when IBM donated a 6 terabyte data-storage system valued at nearly $750,000.

During Wilenskys tenure at UC Berkeley, he served as chair of the Computer Science Division, director of the Berkeley Cognitive Science Program, director of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Project, and board member of the International Computer Science Institute.

Original post:

Artificial intelligence expert Robert Wilensky dies at 61