Dick [[McCullough]]

Richard H. [[McCullough]] retired Knowledge Engineer

email: rhm-at-pioneerca.com

Richard H. [[McCullough]], SBEE, SMEE from MIT. [[PhDEE]] from Polytechnic University. Retired from Bell Labs. I have a life-long interest in Artificial Intelligence, which has evolved into an interest in Real Intelligence -- tools for aiding humans. I invented a new English-like knowledge representation language, mKR, which emphasizes epistemology -- contexts and definitions.

... Dick, at your convenience, please edit and expand on this page as you see fit, so the community can get to know you better. Welcome! ... (read this if it's your first time editing the Ontolog wiki.) =ppy

You asked for it! Here's everything you might want to know about me.

I'm an Army Brat. When I was growing up, we moved to a new home almost every year. By the time I graduated from high school, I had been in all 48 continental States, Canada, Mexico, Panama (we moved from San Franciso, CA to San Antonio, TX via the Panama Canal on an army transport ship), England, and a half dozen countries in Europe. In addition to my native English, I learned some Spanish, French and German.

In six years at MIT, I played lots of sports, was always on the Dean's List, was a Coop. Student with General Electric Co., was a Teaching Assistant in the EE Dept., was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Xi, graduated with SBEE and SMEE degrees. I never took a computer course -- Computer Science was unheard of in those days.

Having been influenced by charismatic professors like Ernst Guillemin and Sam Mason, I sought a research position in the highly mathematical field of circuit theory. But without a PhD, I couldn't get my foot in the door. That motivated me to continue my schooling part time, earning a PhDEE degree from Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (now called Polytechnic Institute of NYU). In the meantime, I had become a "hardware man" working for AT&T Bell Laboratories.

I spent 29 years in the AT&T family, working at Murray Hill NJ, Whippany NJ, Naperville IL and Sunnyvale CA. I did some more teaching, including Information Theory, and Internals of the UNIX Operating System. My first five years of work on Telstar Satellite and high speed PCM digital transmission systems led to 3 patents, a paper on phase-locked-loop regenerators, a Bell System Technical Journal article on error models for digital transmission systems, and promotion to supervisor.

From then on, I was a confirmed "software man". In the next five years, I supervised a special-projects programmer group, and a team of PhDs and programmers working on pattern recognition algorithms. Then I decided that supervising other people just didn't satisfy me -- I had to "get my hands dirty". I "resigned my commission" as supervisor, and for another five years, I worked on information-theoretic performance models for passive sonar systems. I published several more papers, but they were classified TOP SECRET, and even I can't get access to them today.

The next nine years were devoted to designing a testing system & language for No. 5 ESS switching systems, and designing and implementing a CCITT standard CHILL language compiler for writing switching system programs. (The CHILL language is very similar to the Ada language.) What I enjoyed most was "bootstrapping" our CHILL compiler group by converting the Bell Labs portable C compiler into a mini-CHILL compiler. I published two papers on my mini-CHILL compiler, and I was awarded the "1983 Bell Laboratories Distinguished Technical Staff Award for Sustained Achievement", which happily came with a nice monetary bonus.

My last five years with AT&T Network Systems included teaching, taking some Artificial Intelligence courses, and designing custom database systems. Designing database systems started me thinking about the mKR language.

Then I took one of those lucrative early retirement deals that AT&T offered to aid in its government-mandated downsizing effort. My wife and I moved to the mountains, not far from Lake Tahoe, and enjoyed seven blissful years of relaxing, visiting relatives, camping, fishing, and doing a little gambling at the casinos in South Lake Tahoe. When my wife died, I turned my energies to the development of the mKR language and the mKE program which implements it. My continuing work on mKR, and the Semantic Web, eventually led me to Ontolog.