ACM Turing Award Goes to Creator of Influential Innovations in Computer Software Design

New York (ots/PRNewswire) -

- MIT's Liskov, First U.S. Woman Ph.D. in Computer Science,
Pioneered the Standard for Modern Programming Language and Software
Reliability

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has named Barbara
Liskov of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) the winner
of the 2008 ACM A.M. Turing Award. The award cites Liskov for her
foundational innovations to designing and building the pervasive
computer system designs that power daily life. Her achievements in
programming language design have made software more reliable and
easier to maintain. They are now the basis of every important
programming language since 1975, including Ada, C++, Java, and C#.
The Turing Award, widely considered the "Nobel Prize in Computing",
is named for the British mathematician Alan M. Turing. The award
carries a US$250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel
Corporation and Google Inc.

The first U.S. woman to be awarded a Ph.D. from a computer
science department (in 1968 from Stanford University), Liskov
revolutionized the programming field with groundbreaking research
that underpins virtually every modern computer application for both
consumers and businesses. Her contributions have led to fundamental
changes in building the computer software programs that form the
infrastructure of our information-based society. Her legacy has made
software systems more accessible, reliable, and secure 24/7.

Professor Dame Wendy Hall, ACM's President, said Liskov has
played a distinguished role in the evolution of computer science and
engineering to solve real problems. "Her elegant solutions have
enriched the research community, but they have also had a practical
effect as well," said Dame Wendy. "They have led to the design and
construction of real products that are more reliable than were
believed practical not long ago. In addition to her design features,
she focused on engineering innovations that changed the way people
thought about programming languages and building complex software.
These accomplishments were instrumental in moving concepts out of
academia and into the real world."

Andrew Chien, Vice President in the Corporate Technology Group
and Director of Research of Intel Corporation said that "Barbara
Liskov's work consistently reflects an extraordinary combination of
rigorous problem formulation and sound mathematics; a potent
combination she used to create lasting solutions that are the
foundations of modern software systems." He added, "It was my
pleasure to learn from Professor Liskov as an MIT graduate student,
and it is a continuing pleasure to admire her growing impact."

"Google is delighted to help recognize Professor Liskov for her
research contributions in the areas of data abstraction, modular
architectures, and distributed computing fundamentals," said Alfred
Spector, Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives at Google
Inc. "We are proud to be a sponsor of the ACM Turing Award to
recognize and encourage the research that is essential not only to
computer science, but to all the fields that depend on its continued
advancement."

Advances in Software Design

Liskov's most significant impact stems from her influential
contributions to the use of data abstraction, a valuable method for
organizing complex programs. She was a leader in demonstrating how
data abstraction could be used to make software easier to construct,
modify, and maintain. Many of these ideas were derived from her
experience at MIT in building the VENUS operating system, a small
timesharing system that dramatically lowers the cost of providing
computing and makes it more interactive.

In another exceptional contribution, Liskov designed the CLU
programming language, an object-oriented language incorporating
"clusters" to provide coherent, systematic handling of abstract data
types, which are comprised of a set of data and the set of operations
that can be performed on the data. She and her colleagues at MIT
subsequently developed efficient CLU compiler implementations on
several different machines, an important step in demonstrating the
practicality of her ideas. Data abstraction is now a generally
accepted fundamental method of software engineering that focuses on
data rather than processes, often identified as "modular" or
"object-oriented" programming.

Building on CLU concepts, Liskov followed with Argus, a
distributed programming language. Its novel features led to further
developments in distributed system design that could scale to systems
connected by a network. This achievement laid the groundwork for
modern search engines, which are used by thousands of programmers and
hundreds of millions of users every day, and face the challenges of
concurrent operation, failure, and continually growing scale.

Her most recent research focuses on techniques that enable a
system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of
some of its components. Her work on practical Byzantine fault
tolerance demonstrated that there were more efficient ways of dealing
with arbitrary (Byzantine) failures than had been previously known.
Her insights have helped build robust, fault-tolerant distributed
systems that are resistant to errors and hacking. This research is
likely to change the way distributed system designers think about
providing reliable service on today's modern, vulnerable Internet.

Background

Barbara Liskov heads the Programming Methodology Group in the
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, where
she has conducted research and has been a professor since 1972. In
2008, she was named an Institute Professor, the highest honor awarded
to an MIT faculty member.

A member of the National Academy of Engineering, she is a Fellow
of ACM and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received
the Society of Women Engineers Achievement Award in 1996, and in
2002, she was named by Discover magazine as one of the 50 most
important women in science. She received the IEEE John von Neumann
medal in 2004. In 2005, she was awarded the title of ETH Honorary
Doctor by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH). In
2008, she received the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement
Award.

The author of numerous publications, she wrote three books,
including "Abstraction and Specification in Program Development" with
John Guttag, which has educated generations of students in how to
write good software. Liskov served as an associate editor for ACM
Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS) and is a
member of the ACM Special Interest Groups on Programming Languages
(SIGPLAN), Operating Systems (SIGOPS), and Management of Databases
(SIGMOD).

Liskov has also served on the Computer and Information Science
and Engineering (CISE) Advisory Committee of the National Science
Foundation as well as the Computer Science and Telecommunications
Board (CSTB) of the National Research Council. Before joining MIT,
she was a Member of Technical Staff at The Mitre Corporation. A
graduate of the University of California Berkeley with a BA in
mathematics, Liskov earned a Ph.D. at Stanford University, where she
was a graduate research assistant in Artificial Intelligence.

ACM will present the Turing Award at its ACM Awards Banquet on
June 27, in San Diego, CA.

About the ACM A.M. Turing Award

The A.M. Turing Award was named for Alan M. Turing, the British
mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundation and limits
of computing, and who was a key contributor to the Allied
cryptanalysis of the German Enigma cipher during World War II. Since
its inception in 1966, the Turing Award has honored the computer
scientists and engineers who created the systems and underlying
theoretical foundations that have propelled the information
technology industry. For additional information, click on
http://www.acm.org/awards/taward.html

About ACM

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery www.acm.org, is the
world's largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting
computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire
dialogue, share resources and address the field's challenges. ACM
strengthens the computing profession's collective voice through
strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and
recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional
growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long
learning, career development, and professional networking.

ots Originaltext: Association for Computing Machinery
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Contact:
Virginia Gold for the Association for Computing Machinery,
+1-212-626-0505, vgold@acm.org