Comments:"Andreas Raab passed away"
URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Raab
Andreas Raab was born on November 24, 1968 in Rostock, Germany. He attended University of Magdeburg (Germany) where he graduated in 1994, receiving a Diplom-Informatiker degree (equivalent to Msc in Computer Science) and in 1998 a degree as PhD in Computer Science.
His main background is in Computer Graphics and Interactive Systems. During his PhD research he developed various new techniques for analyzing geometric models (global shape estimation operators), visualizing 3D models (based on real-time non-photorealistic techniques), as well as new interaction metaphors for 3D models (e.g., using zoom techniques for inplace interaction and emphasis in 3D models).
While working at Disney he concentrated on implementing real-time graphics capabilities into Squeak, including support for real-time vector graphics (Flash), real-time 3D graphics, advanced 3D modelling techniques (Teddy), as well as integrating these components into the "eToy" environment (the kids scripting environment).
Besides the work done in the area of Computer Graphics, Dr. Raab also developed an extensive expertise in the area of designing and implementing object-oriented systems. This newly developed knowledge has, for example, helped to redesign the Squeak virtual machine into independent plugins, therefore allowing for an easy extension of low-level operations.
He is fluent on all major computing platforms and programming languages with a few of particular expertise such as C/C++, and Smalltalk. Ever since the original release he has maintained the Windows port of Squeak and worked on various other ports (including Android, Windows CE, Sega DreamCast and Sony PlayStation 2).
[edit]Early life and work
He ported the Squeak virtual machine to Windows while he was a Ph.D student at the Magdeburg university in 1997. The core team members of Squeak, led by Alan Kay, were very much impressed with his talent. They basically had no way to let him go somewhere else. So when Raab graduated, they just hired him and took him to California. It didn't take long that he became the productive members of the core team. [1]
Originally from Rostock, Germany, Raab attended the University of Magdeburg, earning a Diplom-Informatiker (equivalent to Msc in Computer Science) in 1994 and PhD in Computer Science in 1998.
[edit]Squeak, Etoys, and Croquet
In December 1995, when he was still at Apple, Alan Kay collaborated with many others to start the open sourceSqueak version of Smalltalk, and he continues to work on it. As part of this effort, in November 1996, his team began research on what became the Etoys system. More recently he started, along with David A. Smith, Andreas Raab, David P. Reed, Rick McGeer, Julian Lombardi, and Mark McCahill, the Croquet Project, which is an open source networked 2D and 3D environment for collaborative work.
In 2001, it became clear that the Etoy architecture in Squeak had reached its limits in what the Morphic interface infrastructure could do. Andreas Raab was a researcher working in Kay's group, then at Hewlett-Packard. He proposed defining a "script process" and providing a default scheduling mechanism that avoids several more general problems.[2] The result was a new user interface, proposed to replace the Squeak Morphic user interface in the future. Tweak added mechanisms of islands, asynchronous messaging, players and costumes, language extensions, projects, and tile scripting.[3] Its underlying object system is class-based, but to users (during programming) it acts like it is prototype-based. Tweak objects are created and run in Tweak project windows.
[edit]Children's Machine
In November 2005, at the World Summit on the Information Society, the MIT research laboratories unveiled a new laptop computer, for educational use around the world. It has many names: the $100 Laptop, the One Laptop per Child program, the Children's Machine, and the XO-1. The program was begun and is sustained by Kay's friend, Nicholas Negroponte, and is based on Kay's Dynabook ideal. Kay is a prominent co-developer of the computer, focusing on its educational software using Squeak and Etoys.
[edit]Reinventing programming
Kay has lectured extensively on the idea that the computer revolution is very new, and all of the good ideas have not been universally implemented. Lectures at OOPSLA 1997 conference and his ACM Turing award talk, entitled "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet" were informed by his experiences with Sketchpad, Simula, Smalltalk, and the bloated code of commercial software.
On August 31, 2006, Kay's proposal to the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) was granted, thus funding Viewpoints Research Institute for several years. The proposal title was: Steps Toward the Reinvention of Programming: A compact and Practical Model of Personal Computing as a Self-exploratorium.[4] A sense of what Kay is trying to do comes from this quote, from the abstract of a seminar on this given at Intel Research Labs, Berkeley: "The conglomeration of commercial and most open source software consumes in the neighborhood of several hundreds of millions of lines of code these days. We wonder: how small could be an understandable practical "Model T" design that covers this functionality? 1M lines of code? 200K LOC? 100K LOC? 20K LOC?"[5]
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| Name | Raab, Andreas |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | Computer scientist |
| Date of birth | (1968-11-24)November 24, 1968 |
| Place of birth | Rostock, Germany |
| Date of death | January 14, 2013(2013-01-14) |
| Place of death | Berlin, Germany |