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June 25, 2020 02:01 pm

Michael Hawley, Programmer, Professor and Pianist, Dies at 58

Michael Hawley, a computer programmer, professor, musician, speechwriter and impresario who helped lay the intellectual groundwork for what is now called the Internet of Things, died on Wednesday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 58. From a report: The cause was colon cancer, said his father, George Hawley. Mr. Hawley began his career as a video game programmer at Lucasfilm, the company created by the "Star Wars" director George Lucas. He spent his last 15 years curating the Entertainment Gathering, or EG, a conference dedicated to new ideas. In between, he worked at NeXT, the influential computer company founded by Steve Jobs after he left Apple in the mid-1980s, and spent nine years as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, a seminal effort to push science and technology into art and other disciplines. He was known as a scholar whose ideas, skills and friendships spanned an unusually wide range of fields, from mountain climbing to watchmaking. Mr. Hawley lived with both Mr. Jobs and the artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, published the world's largest book, won first prize in an international competition of amateur pianists, played alongside the cellist Yo-Yo Ma at the wedding of the celebrity scientist Bill Nye, joined one of the first scientific expeditions to Mount Everest, and wrote commencement speeches for both Mr. Jobs and the Google co-founder Larry Page. Two of Mr. Hawley's Media Lab projects -- Things That Think and Toys of Tomorrow -- anticipated the Internet of Things movement, which aims to weave digital technology into everything from cars to televisions to home lighting systems. Led by companies like Amazon, Google, Intel and Microsoft, the movement is now a $248 billion market, according to the market research firm Statista. Mr. Hawley developed "a pattern of ideas that emerged long before the Internet of Things," Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the Media Lab, said in an email. "I would call that pattern not artificial intelligence, but intelligence in the artificial," he wrote. Mark Seiden, an independent computer security consultant who met Mr. Hawley in the early 1980s when they were both working at IRCAM, a music lab in Paris, and eventually hired him at Lucasfilm, compared Mr. Hawley's exploits to those of George Plimpton, the writer whose participatory kind of journalism had him masquerading as a boxer, a professional football player, a circus performer and a stand-up comedian.

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