Vladimir Slamecka

Vladimir Slamecka, who became the first director of Georgia Tech's School of Information and Computer Science in the fall of 1964 and was a pioneer of the Information Age, died on June 17 of complications from cancer.

"The search for a body of knowledge belonging to such a discipline became an integral component of the school's mission," Slamecka told the alumni newspaper Tech Topics in a 1985 interview. He served as director of the school until 1978.

Slamecka said he began with one room in the electrical engineering building, 1.5 faculty and five students in a new master's program. Under his direction, the school grew into one of the largest in the Institute. It became the College of Computing in 1990.

The international journal Information Processing and Management devoted an issue to the school in 1978.

The school engaged in basic research and studied how the human mind processes information and the ways a computer can interact with natural language, which grew in importance as computers became a mass technology.

The school had international impact under Slamecka.

"We've been very active in helping other countries set up programs at the university level. Our faculty have been in Latin America, China, India and Africa," Slamecka said in the Tech Topics interview.

The faculty was influential in the development of the Information Age in the United States, serving on various national and congressional committees and in an advisory capacity to the White House, he said.

The computer originated as a tool to process numbers, Slamecka said, but it has become clear that its widest use as a tool will be as a processor of nonnumeric data, of natural language.

Watch a 1998 interview with Slamecka discussing the future of technology at www.library.gatech.edu/alumni/innovators/vslameckalan.htm.

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