Saul Amarel

Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence, Amarel was best known for his groundbreaking work in AI methodologies applied to scientific inquiry and engineering practice. He also had a distinguished career as a scientist, engineer, and teacher, and was a pioneering contributor to advanced computing.

He was born in Thessaloniki, Greece to a Greek/Jewish family. Amarel served in the Greek Resistance movement during World War II as the Germans invaded Greece, and was forced to flee with his family to Gaza, which was then in British Palestine. He graduated from Technion — Israel Institute of Technology in 1948 with a Bachelor's degree in Engineering and worked for the Israeli Ministry of Defense before heading to the United States. There he obtained his Master's Degree in 1953 and then a Doctorate in Electrical Engineering in 1955 from Columbia University in New York.

In 1957 he took a position at RCA Sarnoff Labs Computer Theory Group, which he created, in New Jersey, as the Alan M. Turing Professor of Computer Science, pioneering research in the new field of AI. While serving as head of RCA's Computer Theory Research Group in 1984, Amarel served as Director for DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the agency that does research and development for the United States Department of Defense. He developed computer time-sharing, and his laboratory became an early node on Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet.

He took a leave in the 1980s to spend a few years directing a computer science program at the Pentagon, and returned to Rutgers to teach and conduct further research. Amarel received the Award named after Allen Newell from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for his wide-ranging contributions to Artificial Intelligence, especially in advancing understanding of the role of representation in problem solving, and of the theory and practice of computational planning. He also became an IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Fellow.

He lived in Princeton, New Jersey, where he died in 2002 from a heart attack following a six-year battle with cancer. This occurred just as preparations were underway for a celebration of his retirement from Rutgers University, scheduled for December 20, 2002, after more than 40 years of leadership in Computer Science nationally and internationally.