Steven Ericsson-Zenith

Steven Ericsson-Zenith, born July 6, 1966, is a British/American computer scientist.
Steven Ericsson-Zenith is a computer scientist and was a microprocessor developer at INMOS in the 1980s. After INMOS he went to Yale University where he designed the Ease programming language. He also contributed to the design of the occam programming language and the Message Passing Interface standard.
He is the author of the occam 2 Reference Manual and editor of Parallel Processing and Artificial Intelligence.
His doctoral thesis, at Paris University, entitled Process Interaction Models presents the process oriented programming model Ease first introduced during his time at Yale University. Process Oriented Programming is meant to simplify parallel programming by separating concerns. These being shared data structures on the one hand and the processes that act upon them on the other. With the revived interest in parallel processing because of multicore processors, in 2007, Zenith introduced a revised language, now called Carnap, and initiated an open source project to implement that language on multicore architectures.
His work includes the development of "semeiotic" theory and, more recently, a theory of sentience. In his development of the parallel programming languages occam, Linda and Ease he observed that engineering languages have a direct effect upon the problem solving behavior of engineers. He observes that these engineering environments are microcosms of what happens in the real world. This led to more general work on the effect that languages have upon behavior.
In 1998, he launched The Kiss Principle, Inc., a Silicon Valley company that was originally launched as a Virtual CTO but later developed intelligent conversational interface technology in a relationship with Microsoft and Echostar.
Dr. Ericsson-Zenith holds several patents that relate to conversational interfaces. In 2007 he was awarded a key AI/HCI patent, assigned to Microsoft, Interactive multimedia user interface using affinity based categorization. This patent (#7,284,202) appears to be the result of his collaboration with Microsoft in the design of advanced interfaces that apply his "semeiotic" theories. These interfaces mediate content and information through a "universe" of conversational characters. Users naturally develop an affinity relationship with one or more characters in the interface. This allows the interface to be produced in an ongoing fashion, much like a group of multiple personality television channels, using a combination of live and pre-scripted interface elements. Content and information is directed to the population of users, that have "diverse educational and economic backgrounds", through the natural categorization that is established.
He is also a well-known poet and painter and occasionally reads his poetry at cafes in Silicon Valley, California.
Steven Ericsson-Zenith is now a principal investigator at the Institute for Advanced Science & Engineering where he is working on the explanation of senses and the foundations of logic and apprehension (http://www.senses.info). He is also an occasional contributor and critic of (User:Stevenzenith).

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