Dr. Alfred V. Aho

Alfred V Aho is the Lawrence Gussman Professor in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University, where he served as Chair from 1995 to 1997, and in the spring of 2003.

Prior to Columbia, Professor Aho was Vice President of the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs. Professor Aho was also the General Manager of the Information Sciences and Technologies Research Laboratory at Bellcore (now Telcordia). Professor Aho’s research interests include programming languages, compilers, algorithms, software engineering, and quantum computers. Professor Aho is well-published and has authored books and papers on algorithms and data structures, programming languages, compilers, and the foundations of computer science.

Professor Aho was awarded the IEEE John von Neumann Medal and is a Member of the US National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Helsinki and Waterloo, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, ACM, Bell Labs, and IEEE. Professor Aho also won the Great Teacher Award for 2003 from the Society of Columbia Graduates.

Professor Aho is the ’A‘ in AWK, a widely used pattern-matching language. He wrote the initial versions of the string pattern-matching programs egrep and fgrep that first appeared on UNIX.

Professor Aho served as Chair of ACM’s Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computability Theory, and Chair of the Advisory Committee for the National Science Foundation’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate. He is currently the coeditor-in-chief of the contributed articles section of the Communications of the ACM.

He has a BASc in Engineering Physics from the University of Toronto and a PhD in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science from Princeton University.