John Cocke (computer scientist)

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John Cocke
Computer Science
InstitutionsIBM

John Cocke (May 30, 1925 – July 16, 2002) was an American

RISC architecture."[1]

Biography

He was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, US. He attended Duke University, where he received his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering in 1946 and his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1956. Cocke spent his entire career as an industrial researcher for IBM, from 1956 to 1992.[2]

Perhaps the project where his innovations were most noted was in the IBM 801 minicomputer, where his realization that matching the design of the architecture's instruction set to the relatively simple instructions actually emitted by compilers could allow high performance at a low cost.

He is one of the inventors of the CYK algorithm (C for Cocke). He was also involved in the pioneering speech recognition and machine translation work at IBM in the 1970s and 1980s, and is credited by Frederick Jelinek with originating the idea of using a trigram language model for speech recognition.[3]

Cocke was appointed

The Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2000. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,[6] the American Philosophical Society,[7] and the National Academy of Sciences.[8]

In 2002, he was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for his development and implementation of reduced instruction set computer architecture and program optimization technology."[9]

He died in Valhalla, New York, US.

References

  1. ^ a b Schofield, Jack (2002-07-27). "John Cocke". The Guardian. Retrieved 2011-05-10. Cocke's idea was to use fewer instructions, but design chips that performed simple instructions very quickly. [...] Later, this approach became known as reduced instruction set computing (Risc) [...]
  2. ^ Lohr, Steve (2002-07-19). "John Cocke, a Chip Wizard From I.B.M., Is Dead at 77". The New York Times. Retrieved 2024-02-11.
  3. ^ Jelinek, Frederick, "The Dawn of Statistical ASR and MT", Computational Linguistics, 35(4), 2009, pp. 483-494, doi: 10.1162/coli.2009.35.4.35401
  4. ^ John Cocke, The search for performance in scientific processors: the Turing Award lecture. Communications of the ACM, Volume 31 Issue 3, March 1988, Pages 250-253. doi:10.1145/42392.42394
  5. ^ "National Science Foundation - The President's National Medal of Science". Nsf.gov. Retrieved 2014-06-19.
  6. ^ "John Cocke". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 2021-12-21.
  7. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2021-12-21.
  8. ^ "John Cocke". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved 2021-12-21.
  9. ^ "John Cocke". Computer History Museum. Archived from the original on 2013-05-09. Retrieved 2013-05-23.

External links