Don Hillman

Donald Hillman (1931-2018) was an English American computer scientist.

Donald Hillman

Life

Donald J. Hillman was born on November 21, 1931 in London. He did studies on logic and linguistics and received a PhD in mathematical logic at Cambridge University in 1961.

Hillman worked at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA, for 52 years. Initially in 1960 he taught logic in the Department of Philosophy. He was made assistant professor in 1961 and was instrumental in the formation in 1962 of the Center for the Information Sciences (CIS) which was led by Robert S. Taylor from 1962-1967. Hillman served as head of the Division of Information Science from 1964 to 1973 and was director of the Center for Information & Computer Science from 1967 to 1983. He served as head of the Division of Computer Science when it was part of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department from 1983-2001. Hillman was director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1986 to 1990 and helped to establish the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in 2001.

He retired in 2012 and died in October 2018.

Contributions

Hillman believed that an information storage and retrieval system should combine the functions of document retrieval, data retrieval, and reference retrieval, in order to be able to provide a variety of useful responses to different types of information inquiries. He considered commands based on Boolean logic to be unsatisfactory. Instead of the usual terse Boolean queries submitted by intermediaries, the system should be designed to negotiate searches directly with end-users.

Hillman and colleagues designed and developed an online information retrieval system, LEADER, (LEhigh Automatic Device for Efficient Retrieval) which was implemented for Lehigh's Mart Science and Engineering Library as LEADERMART.

Hillman's approach was to treat declarative sentences as the linguistic embodiment of logical relations, so sentences were analyzed by logico-syntactic operations which reduced each sentence into a string of syntactical categories. Each category string was resolved into substrings. Potential document noun-phrase "characteristics" (terms) within the canonical substrings were identified. The structural complexity of each logical relation determines what weight should be assigned to its characteristic relative to the parent document. Term-term and term-document relations are calculated. In effect, documents generated their own vocabulary and conceptual scheme.

A user would submit a paragraph of grammatically correct technical English sentences, which would be processed in the same way as a document and then compared with stored resources. LEADERMART then forms English sentences to present topics logically related to those specified in the initial request. The user is then able to fine-tune his inquiry on the basis of conceptual matches and selective responses. Different rules would be used to provide high precision or high recall.

LEADERMART was made commercially available to anyone. LEADERMART was the first fully operational public online search service and the first online search service to institute connect-hour charging (Bourne & Hahn 2003, pp 308 & 311). It was abruptly ended by the university administration over cost concerns.

Publications

• "The Measurement of Simplicity." Philosophy of Science 29, no. 3 (1962): 225–52. [1]
• "On grammars and category-mistakes." Mind 72, no 286 (1963): 224-234.
• "The notion of relevance (I)." American Documentation 15, no. 1 (1964): 26-34.
• "Mathematical classification techniques for non-static document collections, with particular reference to the problem of relevance." In: Classification Research, Elsinore Conference Proceedings, Munksgaaard, Copenhagen. ED. by P. Atherton. Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1965, pp. 177-209.
• "Negotiation of inquiries in an on-line retrieval system." Information Storage and Retrieval 4, Issue 2 (June 1968): 219-238.
• "The LEADER retrieval system." With Andrew J. Kasarda. In: Proceedings of the May 14-16, 1969, spring joint computer conference, pp. 447-455. 1969.
• "Customized user services via interactions with LEADERMART." Information Storage and Retrieval 9, no. 11 (1973): 587-596.
• "The rise and fall of information science at Lehigh University 1962-1973." In: International Perspectives on the History of Information Science and Technology: Proceedings of the ASIS & T 2012 Pre-conference on the History of ASIS&T and Information Science and Technology. Ed. T. Carbo & T. B. Hahn. Medford, NJ : Information Today, 2012, pp 107-116.

Awards

Lehigh University confers multiple different Hillman awards. [2]

Further reading

• "A Visionary in the Field of Computer Science." Lehigh News 2019 [3]
• Bourne, Charles P. & Trudi B.Hahn. A history of online information services, 1963-1976. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003, pp 308-312.