Curriculum Vitae

Vladimir Slamecka came to the Georgia Institute of Technology in Fall 1964 as Professor and Director of the new School of Information Science. The School (shortly thereafter renamed School of Information and Computer Science) was the world’s first graduate degree program in this new field, and the predecessor (1964-1990) of the Institute’s current College of Computing.

As Director of the new School from 1964 until 1979, Prof. Slamecka had the overall responsibility for the design and administration of its academic programs of instruction and research. The Master of Science degree program was inaugurated and gradually implemented in 1964-65; the subsequently designed Ph.D. degree program began accepting students in Fall 1967; and the B.S. degree program admitted first undergraduates in Fall 1972. By the end of its first decade the School offered over 60 undergraduate and graduate courses, the majority being new to the Institute. During this period, and until his retirement in 1989, Prof. Slamecka participated in the instruction program by teaching graduate courses in information systems design.

During his tenure as Director Prof. Slamecka also initiated and guided the development of other degree programs offered by the School. One such program was the Graduate Program in Biomedical Information and Computer Science, offered jointly with the School of Medicine of Emory University. In this pioneering program inaugurated in 1973 with support of the National Institutes of Health, master's and doctoral degrees were awarded jointly by both universities. (The program was discontinued in 1979.) -- With extramural financial support obtained by Prof. Slamecka, he and the faculty of the School also actively participated in the implementation of the doctoral program in computer science at the Universidad Simon Bolivar in Caracas (Venezuela); and of the master’s program in information and computer science at the Escuela Politecnica Nacional in Quito (Ecuador).

The overall direction of the research program guided by Prof. Slamecka during the initial 15-year existence of the School broadly supported its graduate programs of instruction: applied studies in information and computer systems design and management at the professional master’s level; and at the doctoral level, theoretical research in information science (semiotics, theory of information systems, human information processing) and computer science (theory of computing, programming languages, database systems, advanced algorithms). As early as 1965 Prof. Slamecka obtained NSF support to establish at the School a Laboratory of Information Science; the latter provided not only equipment but also significant financial support for faculty and student research.

Dr. Slamecka’s personal research effort during the 1964-1979 period sought to develop innovative societal applications of information technology. One of the projects he directed in 1973-76, jointly with the School of Medicine, Emory University, demonstrated the utility of digitally stored patient records as a database of empirical medical knowledge, its advantages in clinical decision making over the then popular efforts at computerized diagnosis, for physician performance review, in medical education, and prospectively for discovering new medical knowledge. (One of the world’s largest medical information systems, that of the Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, GA., is based on this work.) ) -- Another project formulated and directed by Prof. Slamecka during the early 1970’s was an application of information technology in remote instruction. The Audiographic Learning Facility operated by the School transmitted computer-stored voice lectures, synchronized with projectable line-graphics, over a single telephone line. Controlled by a remote learner, the program included self-testing coupled to programmed instruction. (The system was used operationally for instruction of students at Lockheed Corp. in Marietta, GA., and of government employees of the State of Georgia.)

Following his resignation as Director of the School in 1989, Prof. Slamecka spent ten years designing and building national information networks in developing countries: ENSTINET, the Egyptian National Science and Technology Network (1980-86, on behalf of the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development); TIAC, the national STI network of Thailand (1988-90, on behalf of the US Academy of Sciences); IPTEKNET, the national science and engineering information network of Indonesia (1990-92, financed by the World Bank and managed by the US National Academy of Sciences); and the network of public information of Costa Rica (1990-91, on behalf of Banco Internacional de Desarollo). Dr. Slamecka also consulted on similar projects elsewhere (China, Brasil).

During his tenure at the Institute Prof. Slamecka attracted over $10 million in extramural support of instruction and research, a substantial portion of which financed course development and research by faculty and graduate students during the School’s early years.

Prof. Slamecka retired from the Georgia Institute of Technology, as Professor Emeritus of Information and Computer Science, in 1989. Since then he has held consulting appointments with Emory University, the Czech Technical University, the United Nations, and with a number of private sector organizations.

Vladimir Slamecka was born in Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) in 1928. Following the communist takeover of the country he was barred, in 1949, from continuing his study in engineering.. He left Czechoslovakia and continued his education in physical sciences and logic at St. Paul’s College (University of Sydney, 1952-54), in sociology at the University of Munich (1955), and at Columbia University in New York where he earned a doctorate in library science in 1962. Subsequently he spent two years as research director at Documentation Inc. in Washington, DC, a world pioneer in non-numeric computer applications (text storage and retrieval, computer publishing, biomedical computing, and management data processing). Among his contributions was the design of the computer-generated index volume to the 2^nd edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia. He also managed the data processing of the Cancer Chemotherapy Service Center, a global program of the National Cancer Institute to test organic compounds for carcinostatic properties.

Prof. Slamecka is Fellow of the AAAS, and a recipient of a number of awards, including a 1984 honorary doctorate of science from the Technical University of Brno. He was married for 34 years to the late Elba I. Seoane, and has two sons.