Career
Minker was born in 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, having 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 Chairman 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 Theory and Practice of Logic Programming Journal.
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 1980-1989. 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.
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