John Cocke

Who was John Cocke?

John Cocke was an American computer scientist recognized for his large contribution to computer architecture and optimizing compiler design. He is considered by many to be "the father of RISC architecture."

He attended Duke University, where he received his Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1946 and his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1956. Cocke spent his entire career as an industrial researcher for IBM, from 1956 to 1992.

Perhaps the project where his innovations were most noted was in the IBM 801 minicomputer, where his realization that matching the design of the architecture's instruction set to the relatively simple instructions actually emitted by compilers could allow high performance at a low cost.

He is one of the inventors of the CYK algorithm. He was also involved in the pioneering speech recognition and machine translation work at IBM in the 1970s and 1980s, and is credited by Frederick Jelinek with originating the idea of using a trigram language model for speech recognition.

Cocke was appointed IBM Fellow in 1972.