John Amsden Starkweather
| John Amsden Starkweather | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
August 30, 1925 Detroit, Michigan, United States of America |
| Died | March 10, 2001 (aged 75) San Rafael, California |
| Fields | Psychology |
| Institutions | University of California, San Francisco |
| Alma mater | Yale, B.A. in Art, 1950; Northwestern, Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, 1955 |
| Doctoral advisor | Carl Porter Duncan |
| Doctoral students | Paul Ekman, Gio Wiederhold |
| Known for | PILOT language |
| Notable awards | Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics |
John Amsden Starkweather (August 30, 1925 – March 10, 2001) was a Professor of Medical Psychology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Starkweather was a clinical psychologist and a valued teacher by generations of clinical psychology interns and graduate students at UCSF. He was a pioneer in taking a psychologist's view of the emerging computer field and incorporating concepts as well as numbers to language processing.
Starkweather's father was an engineer and his mother was a poet. He was raised in Seattle, Washington and served in the United States Coast Guard during World War II from 1943 to 1945. Starkweather graduated from Yale in 1950 with a B.A. in Art and from Northwestern University in 1955 with a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology. He joined the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco in 1955, where he spent his entire career. He married his wife, Jean, in 1952 while he was a graduate student at Northwestern. The Starkweathers had three sons, David, Timothy and Stephen.
Starkweather took an early interest in speech and language, and especially the expression of emotion in the voice. His dissertation, supervised by professor Carl Porter Duncan at Northwestern, was "Judgments of Content-Free Speech as Related to Some Aspects of Personality" and was the first to show that judges could distinguish reliably among different emotions from content-free speech, created by filtering out frequencies above 300 cycles. He went on to study spectral measures of voice and to show that such measures could track day-to-day changes in the degree of depression in hospitalized patients. However, he is best known for his contributions to computer science in relation to psychology, teaching, and medicine.
The 1950s were remarkable for the introduction of the stored-program computer. As Starkweather pursued his voice-quality research, he created a real-time pitch spectrum analyzer that could generate a 20-band pitch spectrum every two seconds from voice recordings. The quantitative analysis demands of such data plunged him into the use of the primitive computer resources available in the early 1960s.
...
Wikipedia