Clarence Ellis (computer scientist)
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Clarence "Skip" Ellis | |
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Born | Clarence Arthur Ellis 11 May 1943 |
Thesis | Probabilistic Languages and Automata (1969) |
Doctoral advisor | David E. Muller[1] |
Clarence "Skip" Ellis (May 11, 1943 – May 17, 2014) was an American
Childhood
In 1958, at age 15, Ellis applied for a job as a
High school and college
Throughout high school, Ellis' teachers recommended that he attend summer school programs at the local universities in Chicago. This was his first encounter with college-level students and university life. Though poor, Ellis was able to attend Beloit College in the fall of 1960 because the church he and his family attended awarded him a scholarship.[citation needed] In Ellis' junior year, Beloit College received an IBM 1620 as a donation,[4] and he and his chemistry professor were asked to set it up. This was the start of the Beloit College computer lab, of which Ellis was the director. During the early 1960s, Beloit didn't offer a degree in computer science, however, Ellis was able to substitute some of his science laboratory work with computer projects. In 1964, Ellis received a B.S. degree from Beloit double majoring in math and physics.
After graduating from Beloit, Ellis enrolled in
Career
Ellis worked at
Ellis accepted a position three years later as an assistant professor in EECS at MIT to work on research related to ARPANET.[citation needed] He left MIT after one year to start work at Xerox PARC and Stanford University. Ellis remained at Xerox PARC and Stanford University for nearly a decade. During his time there, he worked on the icon-based GUI, object-oriented programming languages, and groupware systems. "He was part of the team of sociologists, psychologists and computer scientists who worked on Alto, the world's first personal computer (PC) and its related interfaces and software. Many of these innovations from the 1970s that Ellis was part of were later widely commercialized, for example in Apple's Lisa computer and Microsoft's MS-DOS software. At PARC, Ellis headed the Office Research Group, which developed the first office system to use icons and Ethernet for collaborating at a distance."[5]
In the mid-1980s, Ellis led the Groupware Research Group at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC). While at MCC, he led efforts in Real-time Collaborative Editing, and pioneered the field of Operational transformation.[citation needed] In the early 1990s, Ellis left MCC to become the Chief Architect of the FlowPath workflow product of Bull S.A. in France.[citation needed]
In 1992, Ellis returned to the University of Colorado Boulder as full professor with tenure in the computer science department. There he continued his work on groupware, in particular next-generation, large-scale
In 2013, Ellis won a
Death
Ellis dedicated much of his work in later years to Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana. He died unexpectedly at the age of 71 of a pulmonary embolism during a flight home from Ghana on May 17, 2014.[8]
Selected publications
Ellis C., Wainer J., Barthelmess P. (2003) Agent-Augmented Meetings. In: Ye Y., Churchill E. (eds) Agent Supported Cooperative Work. Multiagent Systems, Artificial Societies, and Simulated Organizations, vol 8. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9200-0_2
Ellis, Clarence A. and Najah Naffah. 2012. Design of Office Information Systems (1st. ed.). Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated.
Ellis, Clarence A., Simon J. Gibbs, Gail Rein. "Groupware: some issues and experiences". Communications of the ACM. 34 (1) January 1991.
Rein, G.L. and C.A. Ellis. "rIBIS: a real-time group hypertext system" in Computer-supported cooperative work and groupware. ed. Saul Greenberg. January 1991. Pages 223–242.
Simmons, Chris, Charles Ellis, Sajjan Shiva, Dipankar Dasgupta, and Qishi Wu. "AVOIDIT: A cyber attack taxonomy." 9th Annual Symposium on Information Assurance (ASIA'14). 2014. 2–12.
References
- ^ Clarence Ellis at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ^ Ellis, Clarence (2002), "Affective Computing: The Reverse Digital Divide", in Jones, Lee (ed.), Making it on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education, Stylus Publishing, pp. 149–159
- ^ Barber, John T. (2006). The Black Digital Elite: African American Leaders of the Information Revolution.
- ^ CIAMPAGLIA, Dante (7 February 2022). "Pioneers in Computer Science: Clarence "Skip" Ellis". Retrieved 3 March 2023.
- ^ Neil. (2019, May 20). Clarence "Skip" Ellis: The First Black PH.D. in Computer Science. Retrieved Sept 16, 2020 from: [1]
- ^ a b Lum, L. (2002). Expanding Horizons: Clarence "Skip" Ellis. Diverse Issues in Higher Education, 19(1), 37.
- ^ "Skip Ellis wins 2013/2014 Fulbright Award". Computer Science. 2013-11-08. Retrieved 2021-01-19.
- ^ "Clarence Ellis's Obituary by The Boulder Daily Camera". Legacy.com. Retrieved 2014-05-23.