Mike Lesk

Mike Lesk is an American computer programmer.

In the 1960 s Mike Lesk worked for the SMART Information Retrieval System project, wrote much of its retrieval code and did many of the retrieval experiments, as well as obtaining a PhD in Chemical Physics. In the 1970 s he worked at Bell Labs, in the group at that built Unix. Lesk wrote Unix tools for word processing (tbl, refer), compiling (Lex programming tool), and networking (uucp.

In the 1980 s Lesk worked on specific information systems applications, mostly with geography (a system for driving directions) and dictionaries (a system for disambiguating words in context), as well as running a research group at Bellcore.

In the 1990s Lesk worked on a large chemical information system, the CORE project, with Cornell, OCLC, ACS and CAS.

From 1998-2002 Lesk headed of the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation. Currently he is on the faculty of the Library and Information Science Department, SCILS (School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies), Rutgers University. Lesk received the Flame award for lifetime achievement from USENIX in 1994, is a Fellow of the ACM, and in 2005 was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.