Name: Michael E. (Mike) Lesk

Born: Unknown

  • Computer scientist who worked for the SMART Information Retrieval System project.
  • Participated with the group at Bell Labs that developed Unix.
  • Created Unix tools for word processing.
  • Developed lex, a tool for creating lexical compilers in Unix.
  • Introduced the Lesk algorithm, a classical algorithm for word sense disambiguation (1986).
  • Authored the Portable I/O Library (the predecessor to stdio.h in C).
  • Assisted in the development of the C language preprocessor.

Significant publications

  • Understanding Digital Libraries (2004).
  • Practical Digital Libraries: Books, Bytes, and Bucks (1997).

Honors and awards

  • Elected to the National Academy of Engineering (2005).
  • Fellow of the ACM (1996).
  • Usenix Flame Award for lifetime achievement (1994).

Quotes

“Two primary points of abuse are the use of the meta fields in websites and extraneous links. Meta fields were originally designed to provide a way for site operators to add some keywords to their sites that did not need to be displayed to users, but might be useful to search engines. A site might use meta fields to give some synonyms for their content or to elaborate ideas that might be taken for granted by readers. For example, a website mentioning Brooklyn many times, but not New York City, might decide to add New York as a meta tag. However, some site operators put words in meta fields that have nothing to do with their content (the most common such word being sex since a great many Internet searches are from people looking for pornography).”

Websites

  • Mike Lesk personal website