CSE Founding Chair Marshall C. Yovits Passed Away

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The

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first CSE Department Chair Marshall Yovits passed away in Deerfield, Illinois on May 4, 2018, only 12 days before his birthday of 95.

Yovits was born in Brooklyn, NY on May 16, 1923 and grew up in Schenectady, NY. He received his BS degree from Union College.  After spending the World War II years in the U.S. Army Air Corps, he earned his PhD in physics from Yale University in 1951.

After his graduation from Yale, Yovits became a senior physicist in John Hopkins University for 5 years, he joined the Office of Naval Research in 1956 as the Head of Information System Branch, and was promoted to Director of Naval Analysis Group in 1962. In 1966, Dr. Yovits joined The Ohio state University as a professor to prepare a new Department called Computer and Information Science, which later was renamed as Computer Science and Engineering.  He was the first Department Chair from 1969 to 1978.  Yovits became the Dean of Science in IUPUI (Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis), 1980-1988.  He retired from IUPUI in 1993.

Yovits’ research was in artificial intelligence. His edited book of “Self-Organizing Systems” includes original and early papers in the fields, which still makes impact.  Yovits was elected to ACM Fellow in 1996 “for efforts in establishing the computer science conferences, for development of educational programs in computer science, and for the early support of seminal computer research”.  He was named Computer Pioneer by the IEEE Computer Society in 1989.