Alfred Vaino Aho
Born	August 9, 1941 (1941-08-09) (age 68) Timmins, Ontario
Residence	U.S.
Fields	Computer Science
Institutions	Columbia University

Alfred Vaino Aho (born August 9, 1941 in Timmins, Ontario) is a Canadian computer scientist.

Aho received a B.A.Sc. in Engineering Physics from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science from Princeton University. He conducted research at Bell Labs from 1967 to 1991, and again from 1997 to 2002 as Vice President of the Computing Sciences Research Center. He currently is the Lawrence Gussman Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. He served as chair of the department from 1995 to 1997, and again in the spring of 2003.

He is widely known for his co-authorship of the AWK programming language with Peter J. Weinberger and Brian Kernighan (the 'A' stands for "Aho"), and his co-authorship of Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (the "Dragon book") with Ravi Sethi and Jeffrey Ullman. He wrote the initial versions of the Unix tools egrep and fgrep. He is also a co-author (along with Ullman and John Hopcroft) of a number of widely used textbooks on several areas of computer science, including algorithms and data structures, and the foundations of computer science.

Aho's current research interests include quantum computing, programming languages, compilers, and algorithms. He is part of the Language and Compilers research group at Columbia.

He has received many prestigious honors, including the IEEE's John von Neumann Medal and membership in both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Waterloo and the University of Helsinki in Finland, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, ACM, Bell Labs, and IEEE. He won the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates in 2003.

Aho has twice served as chair of the Advisory Committee for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation. He is a past president of ACM's Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computability Theory.

[edit] Teaching

Professor Alfred Aho has been teaching at Columbia University in New York since 1995.

[edit] See also

• Aho-Corasick algorithm

[edit] Recommended reading

• A. V. Aho and J. D. Ullman, The Theory of Parsing, Translation, and Compiling, Vol. 1, Parsing. Prentice Hall, 1972. ISBN 0-13-914556-7
• A. V. Aho (ed.) Currents in the Theory of Computing. Prentice Hall, 1973.
• A. V. Aho and J. D. Ullman, The Theory of Parsing, Translation, and Compiling, Vol. 2, Compiling. Prentice-Hall, 1973. ISBN 978-0-13-914564-3
• A. V. Aho, J. E. Hopcroft, J. D. Ullman, The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms. Addison-Wesley, 1974. ISBN 0-201-00023-7
• A. V. Aho and J. D. Ullman, Principles of Compiler Design. Addison-Wesley, 1977. ISBN 0-201-00022-9
• A. V. Aho, J. E. Hopcroft, J. D. Ullman, Data Structures and Algorithms. Addison-Wesley, 1983. ISBN 0-201-00023-7
• A. V. Aho, R. Sethi, J. D. Ullman, Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools. Bell Laboratories, 1986. ISBN 0-201-10088-6
• A. V. Aho, P. J. Weinberger, B. W. Kernighan, The AWK Programming Language. Addison-Wesley, 1988. ISBN 978-0-20107-981-4
• A. V. Aho and J. D. Ullman, Foundations of Computer Science. W. H. Freeman/Computer Science Press, 1992.
• A. V. Aho and J. D. Ullman, Foundations of Computer Science, C Edition. W. H. Freeman, 1995. ISBN 978-0-71678-284-1
• A. V. Aho, M. S. Lam, R. Sethi, and J. D. Ullman, Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools, Second Edition. Addison-Wesley, 2007. ISBN 978-0-32148-681-3

[edit] External links

• Alfred V. Aho
• Computerworld Interview with Alfred V. Aho