Jack Minker

Jack Minker
Jack Minker in 2007
Born	Brooklyn, New York
Fields	Computer Science
Institutions	University of Maryland, College Park
Doctoral advisor	Bernard Epstein
Doctoral students	Chitta Baral, Sharma Chakravarthy, Jose Fernandez, Daniel Fishman, Theresa Gaasterland, Annie Gal, Mark Giuliano, Parke Godfrey, Jarek Gryz, Simon Kasif, Madhur Kohli, Zheng Lin, Jorge Lobo, James McSkimin, Shekhar Pradhan, Arcot Rajasekar, Carolina Ruiz, Deepak Sherlekar, Gerald Wilson, biju K C
Notable awards	Allen Newell Award 2005

Jack Minker is a leading authority in artificial intelligence, deductive databases, logic programming and non-monotonic reasoning. He is also an internationally recognized leader in the field of human rights of computer scientists. He is an Emeritus Professor in the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences.

Minker was born on July 4, 1927 in Brooklyn, New York. He received his BA from Brooklyn College in 1949, MA from the University of Wisconsin in 1950, and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1959. He started his career in industry in 1951, working at the Bell Aircraft Corporation, RCA, and the Auerbach Corporation. He joined the University of Maryland in 1967, becoming Professor of Computer Science in 1971 and the first chair of the department in 1974. He became Professor Emeritus in 1998.

Minker is one of the founders of the area of deductive databases and disjunctive logic programming. He has made important contributions to semantic query optimization and to cooperative and informative answers for deductive databases. He has also developed a theoretical basis for disjunctive databases and disjunctive logic programs, developing the Generalized Closed World Assumption (GCWA).

Minker has over 150 refereed publications and has edited or co-edited five books on deductive databases, logic programming, and the use of logic in artificial intelligence. He is Founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Theory and Practice of Logic Programming.

Minker has been Vice-Chairman of the Committee of Concerned Scientists since 1973, and Vice-Chairman of the Committee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights (CSFHR) of the Association for Computing Machinery from 1980 to 1989. He led the struggle for the release of Anatoly Shcharansky and Alexander Lerner from the late Soviet Union. He also campaigned on behalf of Andrei Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner. His memoir, Scientific Freedom & Human Rights: Scientists of Conscience During the Cold War, was published in 2012 by IEEE Computer Society Press.