ANIMATED PROGRAMS COMPANY INFORMATION

 

 

ANIMATED PROGRAMS BACKGROUND

 

Animated Programs was founded in 1992 and is based in San Carlos, California.  Its mission is to make computer programming “child’s play.”  The ToonTalk brand of products has been researched by the European Union Playground Research Project which includes the University of London, the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology, and other partners in Portugal and the UK. Founder and President Ken Kahn is an MIT computer science Ph.D. and an expert in designing computer programming languages.

 

Animated Programs has been run as a "virtual corporation" contracting with other companies for animation and graphic arts, voice talent and recording, legal and patent work, and testing whenever needed. Animated Programs has developed ToonTalk and ToonTalk 2. ToonTalk has been localized and published by four companies in Europe, Brazil, Australia, and parts of Asia. Two companies have agreed to begin publishing a Japanese version of ToonTalk in Japan beginning December 2001. Animated Programs has also done ToonTalk research under consulting contracts for the University of London, the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, and the Royal Institute of Technology.

 

 

KEN KAHN, FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT

 

Ken Kahn has over 30 years of engineering and computer programming experience. In addition to his duties as President of Animated Programs, he consults for both the University of London and Uppsala University in Sweden. He was an associate professor at Uppsala University and has lectured at MIT, the University of Stockholm, and the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. Dr. Kahn was a visiting scholar at Stanford University from 1992-1997 and has served on the editorial boards of The Journal of Logic Programming, Lisp and Symbolic Computing, New Generation Computing, and IEEE Parallel and Distributed Technology: Systems and Applications.

 

Dr. Kahn is the author of over 50 published articles and has earned a patent for animated user interfaces for computer program creation, control and execution. He has served as researcher/consultant for Xerox PARC, IBM, Rand Corporation, Citicorp, Atari Research, the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, the Institute for New Generation Computer Technology in Tokyo, the University of London and Syracuse University.

 

Dr. Kahn has a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from MIT and a Doctorate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. In his spare time, he has traveled around the world in 80 days.