Jack Minker

Professor Emeritus Jack Minker is a leading authority in artificial intelligence, deductive databases, logic programming and nonmonotonic reasoning. He is also an internationally recognized leader in the field of human rights for computer scientists.

Minker joined the university in 1967. He was founding chair of the Department of Computer Science from 1974 to 1979. During his tenure as chair, the department ranked among the top 12 computer science departments in the U.S. and the top six state universities. Minker is also among the first members of UMIACS.

He was chair of the Advisory Committee on Computing to the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 1980 to 1982. His committee was instrumental in computer science being represented as its own discipline at NSF.

Minker is editor or co-editor of five books on deductive databases, logic programming, and the use of logic in artificial intelligence. He has authored more than 150 refereed publications consisting of journal articles, conference papers and book chapters.

Minker is a founder of deductive and disjunctive deductive databases. He developed the first result in disjunctive databases, the Generalized Closed World Assumption (GCWA), for negated data. He is a founder of disjunctive logic programming, used in artificial intelligence and knowledge representation and reasoning.

Minker has performed extensive service for the scientific community. Among these activities, he was a member of the NASA Robotics Study Group, which made recommendations to NASA for robotics activities in support of space missions.

He served the ACM in many capacities, notably as national program chair from 1968 to 1970; program chair, 1967 National ACM Conference; and vice-chair, Committee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights (SFHR) from 1980 to 1989.

Minker is on the editorial board of numerous prestigious journals, and is founding editor-in-chief of the Theory and Practice of Logic Programming. In SFHR, he has been vice-chair, computer science, of the Committee of Concerned Scientists since 1972/1973. As vice-chair, CSFHR, his reports in the Communications of the ACM listed more than 300 computer professionals in the world whose SFHR had been violated.

Minker retired in 1998 and still performs research and service. His book, "Scientific Freedom and Human Rights: Scientists of Conscience During the Cold War," was published in 2012. He was invited to present lectures at international conferences in 2007, 2009 and 2010.

Minker received his doctorate in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1959.

Go here to view Minker‘s academic publications.