Professor Emeritus Julian Feldman

Information and Computer Science

Daniel G. Aldrich Jr. Distinguished University Service Award

2006-2007

I was born in Chicago on Flag Day, 14 June 1931, twenty-three minutes ahead of my twin brother. I attended three elementary schools and graduated from Marshall High School in February 1949. From 1949 to 1953, I managed to attend five colleges and universities without receiving a bachelor's degree.  But the period was not a total loss; Rita Cohen and I were married on Christmas Eve in 1951.  In 1954, I received an MA. in political science from the University of Chicago and our daughter Karin was born. 

In early 1955, I was drafted into the Army.  Rita and Karin were with me in Arkansas, and Colorado.  But then I was sent overseas to Germany in early 1956.  I was not a happy soldier.  So I applied for an early release to attend a Ph.D. program at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration (GSIA) at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh.

In September 1956, Rita, Karin, and I began a new adventure in Pittsburgh.  Rita wasn't too happy in Pittsburgh, but Pittsburgh was better than the Chicago-Germany split.  I told Rita we would only be in Pittsburgh for one year, and then we could go back to Chicago.  But GSIA was a very exciting place in 1956-57.  Carnegie's first computer, an IBM 650, arrived at the same time I did, and it was installed in the basement of the GSIA--very convenient.  And Herbert Simon and Allen Newell began their work on artificial intelligence.  So at some risk to our marriage, I convinced Rita to stay in Pittsburgh from 1956 until 1959.

My dissertation research started out as a standard experiment in which subjects were asked to predict each of a sequence of binary symbols.  In my experiment the sequence was generated randomly with one symbol occurring 70% of the time and the other occurring 30% of the time.  My results were essentially the same as those obtained by others--subjects predicted each symbol about the same percentage of the time as it occurred in the sequence.  This result confounded economists and decision theorists because subjects could get more correct predictions if they predicted the most frequent symbol on each trial.  To answer this question I asked subjects to "think aloud" to tell me why they were selecting their answers.  Turns out that subjects were looking for patterns in the sequence.  They thought that there had to be a pattern or patterns.  Obvious, right.  The consideration of complex models of behavior like pattern searching was made possible by representing these models as computer programs.  After satisfying some concerns of one of my committee members, the dissertation was accepted, and we (Tammy was born in Pittsburgh) were off to Berkeley.

As an assistant professor in the School of Business Administration at UC Berkeley, I taught classes in organization theory, mathematical social sciences, computer programming, and artificial intelligence; and I continued my work on my dissertation research.  Our third child, Murray, was born in 1960.  Ed Feigenbaum and I edited "Computers and Thought," an anthology of research papers in artificial intelligence and computer models of behavior. 

In 1964, Jim March, one of my Carnegie professors, accepted a position as dean of Social Sciences, at the new UC Irvine campus.  He asked me to join him at Irvine.  After Rita and I looked at the old buffalo ranch site, her reaction was "If you want to pioneer, why don't we go to Israel?"  I told her that I would have a sabbatical shortly, and we could spend the year in Israel.  So, against my wife's wishes, we came to Irvine because I had this romantic notion of participating in the development of a new campus.  When my children grew up, they were amazed that I left a tenure position at Berkeley to come to Irvine.

In 66-67, the Feldman family spent the academic year in Jerusalem. I had an office at Hebrew University and even read a paper on computer assisted learning at an Israeli conference.  Rita studied Hebrew, and our three children managed to survive a Jerusalem public school with the help of an Israeli tutor and sympathetic teachers. 

Back to Irvine in the summer of 1967, Jack Peltason, the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs asked me to chair a program in Information and Communication Sciences.  We agreed to ask the authorities to establish an independent department of Information and Computer Science not located in any existing campus school for a trial period of five years.  Note: After an eventful thirty or so years, this independent department became the School of Information and Computer Science.

Back to 1967, Fred Tonge and I put together the ICS program.  We moved into the trailer park in the Humanities axis. We had problems hiring faculty because everybody else was starting computer science departments.  We had plenty of students.  But we were short of computing resources.  This shortage cost us NSF support and resulted in two things: Feldman took over campus computing as assistant chancellor for computing and ICS started a research project in distributed computing designed to provide computing services with a network of small computers.

ICS had its ups and downs but is now a major campus school with more than forty faculty members, a substantial endowment from the Bren Foundation, and a large research program.

My own research and teaching interests were affected by my service as assistant chancellor for computing.  I taught courses in computing resource management and wrote with Charles Mosmann a book-length manuscript "How much money for computing? and other topics in computing resource management".

In 1988, Rita and I went back to Israel when I was appointed director of the UC Education Abroad Program in Jerusalem.  We had 50 students representing most of the UC campuses.  With the beginning of the Intifada, we were a bit nervous about the safety of our students.  But the only near-problem came from two visiting faculty members from UC Santa Barbara.  My report on the year is one of my favorite writings. Rita became ill in late 1988, and we cut short our planned two-year stay and left in July 1989.

I retired in 1991.  I continued to do some teaching, and I became active in emeritae/i matters. My major contribution during this period was participating in the establishment of the Health Care Facilitator program first at Irvine and Berkeley and eventually on all UC campuses and laboratories.  I served as member of the executive committee and chair of the UCI Emeritae/i association, and I was vice chair and chair of CUCEA, the Council of UC Emeriti Associations.  I also consulted on the history of ICS.

In addition to my administrative service, over the years I served on a number of UC Senate committees (Planning and Budget, Faculty Welfare) and UCI Senate committees (Budget (now Academic Personnel),  Planning and Budget, Faculty Welfare, Privilege and Tenure, Computer Policy, Emeritae/i, Council on Interschool Curricula).