Guest of Honor: A. Michael Noll
Summary of Presentation
Prof. A. Michael Noll will give an overview of the early role of Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. (Bell Labs) in digital art, animation, and music. He will describe his early computer art and animation, showing examples.
This will be a pre-recorded presentation, since his age and health prevent physical attendance.
Biography
Prof. A. Michael Noll worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. (Bell Labs) in the 1960s performing research on human factors and speech processing technology. During the summer of 1962, he programmed his initial digital computer art, what is now known as algorithmic art. At Bell Labs, he devised three-dimensional displays and input devices for use with an interactive digital computer system. He designed raster scanned-display computer graphics with buffer memory in the late 1960s, and invented interactive 3D force-feedback for human-machine communication around 1970, what is today known as haptic.
Leaving Bell Labs in 1971, Prof. Noll was on the staff of the President’s Science Advisor and later worked at AT&T identifying opportunities for new products and services. He was an adjunct professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and a Senior Affiliated Research Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information at Columbia University’s Business School. He has nearly a hundred published professional papers, was granted six patents for his inventions at Bell Labs, and is the author of twelve books on various aspects of communications. He has had published over 130 op-eds and column pieces in various national newspapers and trade publications and wrote over 30 reviews of classical music for the Classical New Jersey Society.
Prof. Noll currently is retired as professor emeritus at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, which he joined around 1984, and where he was dean for a two-year period in the early 1990s.