Don Hillman
Donald Hillman (1931-2018) was an English American computer scientist.
Life
Donald Hillman was born in 1931 in London.
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.
A brief obituary is available at: https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/mcall/name/donald-hillman-obituary?id=13040808
Contributions
Design and development of an online information retrieval system for Lehigh libraries, LEADERMART (LEhigh Automatic Device for Efficient Retrieval for Mart Science and Engineering Library). 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.”
LEADERMART was made commercially available to anyone. LEADERMART was the first fully operational public online search service and the frst online search service to institute connect-hour charging (Bourne & Hahn 2003, pp 308 & 311).
Hillman also did early studies on logic and linguistics
Publications
- "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
The Lehigh University confers multiple different Hillman awards. [1]
Offices
Further reading
- "A Visionary in the Field of Computer Science." Lehigh News 2019 [2]
LEADERMART
- Bourne, Charles P. & Trudi B.Hahn. A history of online information services, 1963-1976. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003, pp 308-312.