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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Author is Given Lifetime Achievement Award by Computer Society
Horn's Work in Information Mapping and Visual Language Honored

Seattle-October 22, 2001- Robert E. Horn, director of the Knowledge Mapping for Strategy and Policy projects at Stanford University, received the prestigious Diana award from the Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer Documentation (ACM SIGDOC) today. The award letter states that the award given to Horn is for creating "an institution or organization that has made an outstanding life-time contribution to the field of user documentation."

The association pointed out that Information Mapping Inc. *, the company that Horn founded and was CEO of for 15 years, "represents one of the few entrepreneurial extensions of basic research that has thriving practical implications for the field and, most recently, your research on visual design has established itself as an intrinsic part of the lore and practice of professional documentation developers today."

Horn is a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Program on People, Computers, and Design at The Center for the Study of Language and Information. The award was presented at the annual conference of SIGDOC being held in Santa Fe, NM.

ACM is the world's oldest and largest educational and scientific computing society. Since 1947, ACM has provided a vital forum for the exchange of information, ideas, and discoveries. Today, ACM serves a membership of more than 80,000 computing professionals in more than 100 countries in all areas of industry, academia, and government. SIGDOC is a Special Interest Group for DOCumentation, a society of senior communication professionals. Members are from all technical and scientific disciplines, those who create documentation in the computing community and those who use computers to create documentation in many styles and mediums.

Among Horn's more recent work, published by MacroVU, Inc., is Mapping Great Debates: Can Computers Think?, a set of seven large, colorful diagrams, measuring 3 x 4 feet each with text and graphics showing both the topical and chronological organization of the debate. Horn's maps display arguments beginning with Alan Turing's 1950 claim that computers would be capable of thinking and move through over 800 individual claims, rebuttals, and counterrebuttals. Each map plots an average of 100 major claims, representing the nearly 400 cognitive scientists, philosophers, AI researchers, and mathematicians, who have weighed into the argument in a significant way. One of the maps, number 6, served as the jumping off point for the current project on consciousness. That map summarized the importance of consciousness in the "Can Computers Think?" debates.

Visually, the maps are groundbreaking. Several hundred icons and illustrations and nearly 60 photographs help the reader navigate and provide easy landmarks and crystal-clear visual representation of the arguments. They are a splendid example of the new international auxiliary language described in Horn's most recent book, Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century, also published by MacroVU, Inc. It is a pathfinding work that shows how This new language that combines words, images, and shapes is emerging in business and academia.

Horn is a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science , a Distinguished Consulting Faculty member of the Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, and a Woodrow Wilson Fellow.

MORE INFO ON THE SIGDOC CONFERENCE: http://mulford.cs.ucr.edu/stilley/sigdoc2001