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Newell and Simon Papers Online



Contact:        Cindy Carroll                                           For immediate release
                (412)268-7260                                           September 8, 2000

Newell and Simon Research Papers
Online for First Time at Carnegie Mellon
PITTSBURGH--The University Archives at Carnegie Mellon University has
announced the online availability of the papers of computer scientist Allen
Newell, including his collaborations with Nobel Prize-winning economist
Herbert A. Simon.
Access to the Newell and Simon papers is being developed as the second
phase of the university's original HELIOS digital archive, funded in part
by a two-year grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library
Services (IMLS), with support from Noël Marie Newell, wife of the late
Newell.
Newell, who died in 1992, pioneered the study of artificial intelligence
through designing computer architectures and program languages that were
modeled on human problem solving behaviors. In co-designing a
groundbreaking series of "thinking machines" such as a chess-playing
program, the Logic Theorist and the General Problem Solver, Newell
established himself as an expert in experimental cognitive psychology. His
most enduring achievement, Soar (State, Operator and Result theory), was
not only a problem-solving program but also a unified theory of cognition
that brought him renown in both machine and human science.
Simon, Newell's frequent research partner, applied scientific methods to
the previously theoretical field of economics. His first book,
Administrative Behavior, called for the use of quantitative experiments in
studying organizational decision-making. At the RAND Corporation in the
1950s, Simon collaborated with fellow consultant Newell to use digital
computers to model the symbolic operations of the mind, as determined by
empirical study of problem solving processes. Newell and Simon were jointly
awarded the Association for Computing Machinery's prestigious Turing Award
in 1975. Simon received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1977.
The Newell and Simon collections at Carnegie Mellon include technical
reports, lectures, teaching materials, computer and publication drafts.
Researchers may search, browse and print more than 100,000 digital images
from the Allen Newell Collection (http://heinz1.library.cmu.edu/Newell/).
An estimated 150,000 images will be available online when the project is
completed. Digitization of the Herbert A. Simon Collection began in summer
2000.
Materials from the collections that are not selected for
digitization-including correspondence with other leading researchers in the
fields of computer science, cognitive psychology and economics-may be
examined in their original formats at the University Archives in Carnegie
Mellon's Hunt Library.
The university's premier digitization project, HELIOS, is complete and
provides online access to the bulk of the H. John Heinz III Archives.
Nearly 800,000 images documenting Heinz's service in the U.S. House of
Representatives (1971-1976) and the U.S. Senate (1977-1991) are now
available to researchers via the Internet. Since January 1998, when HELIOS
went online, the digital archive has logged more than 1,700 users who have
initiated more than 2,700 search sessions. The HELIOS project was supported
by the Teresa and H. John Heinz III Foundation, Heinz Company Foundation,
and the Howard and Vira I. Heinz Endowments, with additional funding from
Carnegie Mellon and CLARITECH Corporation.
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