UCLA Engineering: UCLA Engineer Fall 2004

Alan C. Kay Receives Three Major Scientific Honors in 2004

By Christopher Sutton

Alan C. Kay, an adjunct professor of computer science at UCLA whose work in the 1960s and 1970s opened the door for the personal computing revolution, received three major scientific awards this year – the Kyoto Prize, the Turing Award and the Charles Stark Draper Prize.

Kay joined the computer science department in the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science in 2002, and teaches a Transpacific Interactive Distance Education (TIDE) course on user-interfaces and end-user scripting as learning environments for children. Using technology developed by UCLA’s Center for Digital Innovation, TIDE courses are taught simultaneously at UCLA and Kyoto University in Japan.

“Dr. Kay’s tremendous contributions to the field of computing and education deserve this exceptional acclaim,” said Milos Ercegovac, professor and chair of UCLA’s computer science department. “It has been truly inspiring for our faculty and students to have such a renowned computer scientist in our midst.”

The Kyoto Prize is an international award given by the Inamori Foundation to people who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of mankind. Kay was honored for “creating the concept of personal computing and contributing to its realization.”

Kay received the 2003 Turing Award, considered the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” from the Association for Computing Machinery for his breakthrough concepts on personal computing and for leading the team that invented Smalltalk, the first complete dynamic object-oriented programming language.

He was awarded the National Academy of Engineering’s 2004 Charles Stark Draper Prize along with three colleagues for their work at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s. The team, credited with creating the first practical networked personal computer, included Kay, Robert W. Taylor, Butler W. Lampson and Charles P. Thacker.

While at Xerox in the early 1970s, Kay led efforts to develop perhaps the most significant leap in human-computer interactivity, the graphical user interface (GUI). Kay designed the GUI to use icons as graphical representations of computing functions - the folders, menus and overlapping windows - based on his research into the processes of learning and creativity.

Kay’s abiding interest in children and education led him to use Smalltalk as a tool for teaching computing concepts at the elementary level. Kay found that children learned better if touch, images and symbols are combined with plain text. Today, he is President of Viewpoints Research Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to children and learning that he founded in 2001.

As a student at the University of Utah, Kay invented dynamic object-oriented programming, and was a member of the university research team that developed continuous tone 3D graphics for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).

While participating in several design committees for the fledgling ARPANET project, Kay came to know UCLA computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock, who created the basic principles of packet switching, the technology underpinning the Internet and still used today.

“Alan’s contributions to personal computing have been revolutionary and continue to have an impact today,” said Kleinrock. “The recognition he has received [this year] shows how influential his insights have turned out to be.”