Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science in the context of Language technologies

Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American scholar whose work influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology. His primary research interest was decision-making within organizations and he is best known for the theories of "bounded rationality" and "satisficing". He received the Turing Award in 1975 and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978. His research was noted for its interdisciplinary nature, spanning the fields of cognitive science, computer science, public administration, management, and political science. He was at Carnegie Mellon University for most of his career, from 1949 to 2001, where he helped found the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, one of the first such departments in the world.

Notably, Simon was among the pioneers of several modern-day scientific domains such as artificial intelligence, information processing, decision-making, problem-solving, organization theory, and complex systems. He was among the earliest to analyze the architecture of complexity and to propose a preferential attachment mechanism to explain power law distributions.

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology and began granting four-year degrees. In 1967, it became Carnegie Mellon University through its merger with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, founded in 1913 by Andrew Mellon and Richard B. Mellon and formerly a part of the University of Pittsburgh.

The university consists of seven colleges, including the College of Engineering, the School of Computer Science, the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Tepper School of Business. The university has its main campus located 5 miles (8.0 km) from downtown Pittsburgh. It also has over a dozen degree-granting locations on six continents, including campuses in Qatar, Silicon Valley, and Kigali, Rwanda (Carnegie Mellon University Africa) and partnerships with universities nationally and globally. Carnegie Mellon enrolls 15,818 students across its multiple campuses from 117 countries and employs more than 1,400 faculty members. Carnegie Mellon is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity".

Allen Newell (March 19, 1927 – July 19, 1992) was an American researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department of Psychology. He, Herbert A. Simon, and Cliff Shaw contributed to the Information Processing Language (1956) and two of the earliest AI programs, the Logic Theorist (1956) and the General Problem Solver (1957). He and Simon were awarded the ACM Turing Award in 1975 for their contributions to artificial intelligence and the psychology of human cognition.