Peter Freeman and John Hopcroft

Peter A. Freeman, recently named a director at the Washington Advisory Group in Washington, DC, was selected for his service as Assistant Director of NSF for CISE over the past four years. He assumed the CISE position in 2002, following 12 years as Dean of the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology and a term as Chief Information Officer for the Institute.

During his tenure at NSF, Freeman brought about dramatic changes in the directions and support of computing research. He reduced the number of CISE divisions and programs, and clustered the remaining programs to create more effective and flexible program management and, ultimately, better service to computing researchers. He also shepherded the move of the Shared CyberInfrastructure Division (SCI) out of CISE and into the Office of the Director.

Peter Freeman was largely responsible for three additional major initiatives that will change the face of computing research over the next two decades. He introduced the Global Environment for Networking Innovations (GENI) initiative, which will redefine networking globally as we know it. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) will bring together computing community leaders to determine research directions and infrastructure needs in a fashion that will allow the CISE community to compete effectively against other S&E disciplines for limited research and infrastructure funds. And the Broadening Participation (BPC) program (funded at unprecedented levels) will develop the diverse human capital necessary to sustain the U.S. computing research enterprise.

John E. Hopcroft, the IBM Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics in Computer Science at Cornell University, was recognized for his remarkable record of service to the computing research community.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s he was involved in broadening SIAM's scope to include computing. When the IEEE and ACM started conferences such as FOCS and SIGACT, Hopcroft served on the program committees, first as a member and then as chair. He was one of the founding editors, and later managing editor, of SIAM’s prestigious journal SICOMP. He subsequently served on the Board of Directors of SIAM (1989-97) and as chairman of the board (1992-93). At NSF, Hopcroft was active on various NSF advisory boards, including the National Science Board, where he chaired the Committee on Program and Plans that oversaw all major science funding, including computer science programs and the supercomputing centers. He was instrumental in this committee making the decision to privatize the Internet.

Hopcroft has served on many advisory boards, including NASA’s SSAAC which helped prioritize space research missions after the Challenger disaster. He has served professional organizations such as AAAS where he has served as chair of Section T on Information, Computing and Communications (1988-91) and as council delegate from 1998 to the present. He has served as editor for a number of leading journals; on advisory boards for academic departments such as Princeton, Yale, CMU, USC, and UC Berkeley; and on numerous review committees. Hopcroft helped the Vietnam Educational Foundation build computer science education in Vietnam, and currently is working with the Millennium Foundation, with support from the World Bank, to help build science infrastructure in Chile.

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