CRA Board Elections

By Stacy Cholewinski

Incumbents

Sandra Johnson Baylor is a research staff member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. She earned a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Rice University. Baylor is an incumbent, having served CRA as Chairperson of the CRA/ACM Coalition to Diversify Computing (CDC), a member of the CRA women's committee (CRA-W), and a member of the CRA awards committee. While a member of CRA-W, she wrote the graduate information kit for women in CS&E.

Baylor is also a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS), and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Her most recent awards include: Best Paper Award (in Systems), International Conference on High Performance Computing (1997); IBM Research Division Award (1995); and IBM Invention Plateau Awards (1995, 1996, 1998). She would like to "become more involved in efforts to educate Congress on the importance of computing research to the nation's economic health."

C. William Gear, President of the NEC Research Institute, earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Illinois. His awards and honors include: Fulbright (1956), ACM SIGNUM Forsythe Award (1979), Honorary Doctorate, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm (1987), National Academy of Engineering (1991), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1996).

He would like to use "[his] past experience of 30 years in an academic environment to improve interactions and collaboration between university and industrial researchers."

Gear has served the community as SIAM President (1987-88); Chair, Committee for International Congresses on Industrial & Applied Mathematics, (1991-95); SIAM - VP for Publications (1990-92); ACM Council Member (1975-77); and ACM SIGNUM Chair (1973-75).

Edward Lazowska, incumbent and CRA Board Chair, has been involved with CRA for about seven years. Lazowska believes that "CRA is the main player that the computing research community has in critical areas such as research policy, community building, information gathering and dissemination, and workforce strengthening and diversification." He's looking forward to continuing to provide what leadership he can to these efforts, throught working with the headquarters team, the Board, and the membership.

He is a member of the National Research Council's (NRC) Computer Science and Telecommunications Board(CSTB); Chair of the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for CISE (Computer and Information Science and Engineering); a member of the Technical Advisory Board for Microsoft Research; and a member of the Board of Directors, Washington Software Alliance.

Lazowska is Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington and earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto.

Newly Elected

John Gannon earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Toronto. His research interests include software engineering, particularly program testing and applications of formal methods to analyze software artifacts, and information security.

Gannon states, "there is less understanding of the role of federally funded research in advances in computing technology. Reducing defense spending on research. . .[has] drastically reduced funding for basic computing research. We must try to convince decision-makers that producing systems which are truly novel or control critical devices is as difficult and exciting as science's other grand challenges."

Gannon is Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland.

Leah H. Jamieson earned her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University. She has been an IEEE Fellow (1993), IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor (1990-94), IEEE Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer (1990-91), and a Co-recipient of the 1997 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Chester F. Carlson Award for Innovation in Engineering Education (1997).

Jamieson was profiled in the CRA-W Careers Booklet "Women in Computer Science'' (1996). She is a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Purdue University. She led the development of Purdue's BS in Computer Engineering degree and is co-founder of the Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program (funded by NSF, US Department of Education, US Corporation for National Service, and industrial sponsors).

Sidney Karin is the Director of the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), Director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), and a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of California, San Diego.

Karin stated, "Continued excellence in computing research is of vital importance, as technology has become a mainstay of American life. . . I hope to bring to the CRA Board my long experience in bringing government, industry, and academia together for productive research projects."

Karin comes to CRA with a background including accomplishments such as Founder, SDSC (1985); co-author, "The Supercomputer Era"; member, NSF's CISE Directorate Advisory Committee (presently); Chair, Federal Networking Council Advisory Committee (1991-97); and member, CSTB, NRC(1988-92).

He earned a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from the University of Michigan.

Barbara Ryder, a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rutgers University.

Ryder has served CRA as a selected panelist at three CRA Workshops on Academic Careers for Women in Computer Science (1993,1994,1996), and has also served the community on the ACM SIGPLAN Executive Committee (1989-99) as elected Chair (1995-97), Vice Chair (1993-95), member-at-large and Chair of the Professional Activities Committee (1989-93). She was also an NSF site visitor, Center for Research on Parallel Computation (1991,1993,1994); recent NSF panel participant (Experimental Software Systems, 1998, Software Engineering, 1996, Careers, 1995, Research Infrastructure, 1995); Acting Director of the Laboratory for Computer Science Research, Rutgers University (1996); Co-PI on NSF travel grant to fund faculty from primarily minority and female institutions to attend tutorials and conferences at ACM SIGPLAN PLDI'94; member of the Editorial Board, Journal of Programming Languages (1992-present) and IEEE Software (1989-92); and an Associate Editor for ACM Letters on Programming Languages and Systems (LOPLAS) (1989-94).

Her research interests include programming languages and compilers, and software for sequential and parallel programming environments.

Daniel Reed is Professor and Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has served on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, and currently serves on the boards of Concurrency Practice and Experience, the International Journal of High-Speed Computing, and Performance Evaluation and Modeling for Computer Systems. He is past treasurer and member of the board of directors for the ACM SIGMETRICS special interest group.

In addition, he is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Parallel Computation (CRPC), where his research group is integrating performance analysis tools with data-parallel compilers.

Reed earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University.

Appointees

Timothy W. Finin is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Prior to joining the faculty at UMBC, he was a Technical Director at the Unisys Center for Advanced Information Technology, a member of the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, and on the research staff of the MIT Artificial Intelligence(AI) Lab.

He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois and his current research is focused on the theory and applications of intelligent software agents. A former AAAI councillor, he is currently serving as AAAI's representative on the CRA board.

Finin's past experiences include organizing the CRA Effective Teaching Workshop, and serving as past program chair and general chair of the IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Applications, the general chair of the first two ACM Conferences on Information and Knowledge Management, and the program co-chair of the Second ACM Autonomous Agents conference.

Eugene Spafford is a Professor of Computer Sciences at Purdue University. Spaf (as he is known to his friends, colleagues, and students) is interim director of the COAST Laboratory and the Purdue CERIAS (Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security).

His current research interests are primarily in the areas of: computer and network security; ethical and societal implications of computing; software validation, verification, and debugging; and reliable distributed computer systems.

Recent accomplishments include being named an ACM Fellow in 1997; serving as program chair of a workshop on Security in Large-Scale Distributed Systems; and being named the interim director of CERIAS (he is expected to be named as the first full-time director by year's end). He also coordinated a letter to various Congressional leaders against World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) legislation, explaining that it threatens some forms of computer security research.

He earned his Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and is currently serving as the ACM representative to the CRA board.