Personal

 

Links to meaningful material from my past

Personal Reminiscences

  1. Dianne Foster, my wife of 38 years died on July 4, 2017. A few pages celebrate her life and record her funeral.

  2. Memorial services for my parents, June 1999 and August 2000

  3. My parents both participated in the Shoah Foundation project to record the reminiscences of survivors of the concentration camps and labor camps of World War II.  I am posting versions of their videos, but because they speak in Hungarian, I also include a transcription into English.

  4. Etel (Angyal) Szolovits interview

  5. Ármin Szolovits interview

  6. My PhD research supervisor was Prof. Frederick B. Thompson at Caltech.  Fred did his own doctoral work in mathematical logic at Berkeley for Alfred Tarski, one of the great logicians of the 20th century.  He then worked for RAND and GE Research, developing techniques for natural language access to complex data, before joining the Caltech faculty in 1965.  Fred retired in the 1990’s and lived to the ripe old age of almost 92, traveling and dancing to the end. Dianne and I had the pleasure of dining with him a few months before his death.  Caltech posted a nice obituary of Fred in 2014.

  7. My mentor and colleague at MIT was Prof. William A. Martin, who died young in 1981.  His (partial) collection of papers may be found at this link. In addition to his early development of symbolic mathematics and automatic programming systems, he did pioneering work on the relationship between knowledge representation and the processing of natural language.

  8. In memoriam, Elemér Gabrieli

  9. Reconstruction of the history of Newton Highlands

  10. In 1995, I reconstructed the 1975 Lab for Computer Science Brochure on the Web—many pictures of younger people!


Various Photographic Essays (for more recent photos, see the Photos tab)

  1. Photographs of the Gehry models for the Stata Center. CSAIL now occupies the completed building.

  2. Chris Tsien's Photos of her MEDG years

  3. NAS/CSTB study panel on patient confidentiality

  4. Visit to Mayo Clinic

  5. MEDG Group retreat pictures from Talbot House, 1997

  6. A 2008 interview video with Tom Munnecke about the origin
    of my ideas on personal health records

  7. A 2006 interview about the intellectual history of CSAIL


Family links:

  1. My son, Daniel, is writing a SciFi/Fantasy novel serialized as
    a blog, Dispatches from Otherworld.  It is also readable in a
    typeset, serial form.

  2. My daughter, Lisa, is a theater director in New York City. Her web site shows some of her projects.

  3. My wife and her sister Carolyn are (occasionally) writing a blog about food
    and economy: Two Sisters Making Dinner.

 

Photo by Philip Greenspun