Al Aho is research vice president at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies and director of its Computing Sciences Research Center. He is responsible for computing sciences and software research at Bell Labs. Previously he was professor and chair of the Computer Science Department at Columbia University, general manager of the Information Sciences and Technologies Research Laboratory at Bellcore, and director of the Computing Science Research Center at AT&T Bell Labs.
Dr. Aho received a B.A.Sc. in Engineering Physics from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (Computer Science) from Princeton University. He has published more than sixty technical papers and ten textbooks in algorithms, data structures, compilers, database systems and the foundations of computer science. He is a co-inventor of the AWK programming language and other UNIX system tools.
Dr. Aho is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, and is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, Bell Labs, and IEEE. He holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Helsinki and Waterloo. He has been chair of ACM's Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computability Theory, chair of the National Science Foundation's Advisory Committee for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, and a member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council.