SPEAKERS' BIOS SPEAKERS' BIOSThe Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing
Dr. Fran Allen, IBM Fellow and member of the National Academy of Engineers, is a Senior Manager at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center. She is credited with establishing the theory of program optimization and reducing the theory to practice. While most of her 37 years in the field have been with IBM, she has had university appointments at NYU, Stanford, and Berkeley. In 1991, Fran Allen received an honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Alberta.
Dr. Ruzena Bajcsy is a Founding Fellow of the AAAI and Fellow of the IEEE since January 1992. She received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Slovak Technical University in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia in 1967 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1972. A faculty member of the University of Pennsylvania since 1972, Prof. Bajcsy has done considerable work in the area of Machine Perception, covering the whole spectrum of problems (segmentation, 3D shape recognition, multiresolution problems, etc.) that the field of Computer Vision involves, and has extended it to other modalities, in particular to touch. In 1983, she introduced a new research paradigm, called Active Perception, which connects perception with action. This new paradigm affords to change many ill posed problems in Computer Vision into well posed problems and hence make them solvable in a predictable manner. She has built the GRASP Laboratory, which now enjoys a worldwide reputation, and has produced numerous publications on her research results. Recently, the GRASP Laboratory has been engaged in the investigation of cooperative behaviors amongst machines and humans.
Dr. Dorothy E. Denning is Professor and Chair of Computer Science at Georgetown University, where she is currently working on policy and technical issues relating to cryptography and wiretapping. Winner of the 1990 Distinguished Lecturer in Computer Security Award and past President of the International Association for Cryptologic Research, Denning is widely recognized for her contributions to information security and for her book "Cryptography and Data Security." Recently, she chaired the Forum on Rights and Responsibilities in Network Communities for the National Research Council and co-chaired the 1st ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security.
Dr. Adele Goldberg, Chairman of ParcPlace Systems, received a Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Chicago and spent 14 years as researcher and laboratory manager of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Solely and with others, Adele wrote the definitive books on the Smalltalk-80 system, does a regular column for Object Magazine, and has authored numerous papers on project management and analysis methodology using object-oriented technology. Most recently, Adele received PC Magazine's 1990 Lifetime Achievement Award for her significant contributions to the personal computer industry.
Dr. Shafi Goldwasser is a professor of computer science at MIT. She was born in New York City 1958, received a B.S. (1979) in Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon university, and M.S. (1981) and Ph.D (1983) in computer science from the university of California at Berkeley. She joined the MIT faculty in 1983. Her research areas include complexity theory, cryptography, computational number theory, and fault tolerant distributed computing. Professor Goldwasser is a recipient of the NSF presidential young investigator award of 1987, and a recipient of the NSF faculty award for women of 1991. She won the Godel prize of theoretical computer science for her work on interactive proofs.
Dr. Susan L. Graham has been a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley since 1971. She is currently a Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. She received an A.B. in mathematics from Radcliffe College (Harvard University) and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University. From its founding in 1977 through 1992, she was editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. She has served on numerous government and academic advisory committees. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Professor Graham's primary technical interests are in the areas of the design and implementation of programming languages and the development of interactive environments for software development. Most recently, she has become involved in research in the use of coordination structures for parallel computing. She has been a Distinguished Lecturer and a plenary speaker on many occasions. She delivered the 1992 Forsythe lectures at Stanford University.
Dr. Irene Greif is Director of Workgroup Technologies at Lotus Development Corporation. She invented the Version Manager now shipping in 1-2-3 Release 4 which analysts have consistently designated the most significant and innovative group-enabling feature in spreadsheets. She now heads a growing research group on topics including collaborative work, group-enabled desktop applications and managing distributed information.Greif was previously on the faculties of Computer Science at University of Washington and EECS at MIT. She headed a research group in the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science focusing on shared calendars, co-authoring and real-time collaboration systems. In 1984 she organized a workshop on a topic she dubbed "Computer-Supported Cooperative Work" and subsequently served as Program Chair of the first CSCW conference and editor of "Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: A Book of Readings." Greif holds a S.B., S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from MIT.
Dr. Barbara J. Grosz is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University. Prof. Grosz has made seminal contributions to the field of natural-language processing through her research and writings, and is widely regarded as having established the research field of computational modeling of discourse. A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), she is also the President of the AAAI and a Member and former Chair of the Board of Trustees of the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence, Inc. Before joining the faculty at Harvard, she was Director of the Natural Language program at SRI International, and co-founder of the Center for the Study of Language and Information. Prof. Grosz received an A.B. in mathematics from Cornell University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. Karen Sparck Jones is a senior academic at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. She has worked on natural language and information processing since the late fifties, with a range of projects and numerous publications to her credit, and is well known in the international research community in these areas for her many and varied intellectual and professional contributions. She will be President of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1994.
Dr. Maria Klawe is well known for her research contributions to theoretical computer science, particularly her seminal work in matrix searching, a body of techniques with extensive applications in computational geometry, operations research and molecular biology. She is also the leader of E-GEMS, a large international project on the development of software and supporting curriculum materials for mathematics education in grades 4-8. Maria is renowned as an administrator and leader, serving as Head of the Department of Computer Science at UBC since 1988, as Vice-Chair of the Board of the Computing Research Association, on the B.C. Premier's Advisory Council on Science and Technology, as a Trustee of the American Mathematical Society, and on many other executive committees and councils of professional societies and research institutes in Canada and the United States.
Dr. Nancy G. Leveson is Boeing Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. She is the founder of the new research area of Software Safety, whose goal is to provide assurance that software will not contribute to accidents in systems where the consequences of software errors could involve loss of life or property. Her research interests include software hazard analysis, requirements specification and analysis for safety, design for safety, verification of safety, and design of human-machine interaction. Dr. Leveson is Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and a member of the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association. She has appeared on the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, 20/20, CNN, and several BBC documentaries. She consults widely for industry and government agencies around the world on safety-critical systems in aerospace, defense, medical, and transportation systems.
Dr. Barbara Liskov received her B.A. in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley and her M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University. She is currently a member of the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she is the NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering. Her research and teaching interests include programming languages, programming methodology, distributed computing, and parallel computing. She is a member of ACM, IEEE, the National Academy of Engineering, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Mary Shaw is a Professor of Computer Science and Associate Dean for Professional Programs at Carngeie-Mellon University.She has been a member of this faculty since completing the Ph.D. degree at Carnegie-Mellon in 1972. From 1984 to 1987 she served as Chief Scientist of CMU's Software Engineering Institute, where she still holds a joint appointment. Dr. Shaw is an author or editor of six books and more than one hundred papers and technical reports. In 1993 received the Warnier prize for contributions to software engineering. She is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Dr. Telle Whitney is Principal Engineer at Actel Corporation, a leader in Field Programmable Gate Arrays, a new and exciting design technology. She has been with Actel since its early days after receiving her Ph.D. from Caltech in 1985. At Actel she was responsible for the design of their proprietary chip generation software, used to create their last two chip families, consisting of eight different silicon parts. She is currently head of the architecture group, and is focused on the design of more usable FPGA software. Dr. Whitney is the program chair for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.