Service Award Winners

CRA presents two awards, usually annually, to individuals for outstanding service to the computing research community. The first, the Distinguished Service Award, recognizes service in the areas of government affairs, professional societies, publications, or conferences, and leadership that has a major impact on computing research.

The second award honors the late A. Nico Habermann, who headed NSF's Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate until his death. Dr. Habermann was deeply committed to increasing the participation of women and underrepresented minorities in computing research. This award is given to an individual who has played a leadership role in aiding members of underrepresented groups within the computing research community. It recognizes work in areas of government affairs, educational programs, professional societies, and public awareness.

CRA Distinguished Service Award

Bill Joy, Sun Microsystems, Inc., and Ken Kennedy, Rice University, have been selected as co-recipients of the 1999 CRA Distinguished Service Award for their vision of computing in the new millennium and for mapping out the government's role in fulfilling that vision. Joy and Kennedy chaired the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). They led PITAC through a series of public meetings in which they studied numerous issues, including: high-end computing, scalable infrastructure, software, funding modes, research management, and socioeconomic and workforce issues.

PITAC's final report, issued on February 24, 1999, concluded that information technology will be one of the key factors driving progress in the 21st century, and that a vigorous information technology research and development effort is essential for achieving America's aspirations for the new century. At the same time, federal support for research in information technology is seriously inadequate. To address this problem, the report recommended that the federal government increase its support for information technology research by $1.37 billion by FY 2004.

The administration has already responded to the report by proposing a dramatic $366 million increase in next year's computing research budget. The computing research community owes an enormous debt to Bill Joy and Ken Kennedy for making a compelling case regarding the crucial importance of information technology research to the future of this country.

Bill Joy, Chief Scientist at Sun Microsystems Inc., co-founded the company in 1982. At the University of California, Berkeley 1975-1982, he was the principal designer of Berkeley UNIX, for which he received a Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. In 1993, the USENIX Association awarded him its Lifetime Achievement Award for his service to the UNIX community. Bill Joy is also a Member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Bill Joy is the inventor/co-inventor of many of Sun's technologies (including Sun's Network File System, Sparc Microprocessor Architecture, Java, and Jini technologies) and business strategies (open systems, "The Network is the Computer," Java licensing strategy, and Community Source licensing (for Jini).

Bill Joy's current research involves new uses of distributed computing enabled by using Java and Jini, new methods of human-computer interaction, new microprocessor and system architectures, and the uses in computing of scientific advances in areas such as complex adaptive systems, quantum computing, and the cognitive sciences.

Ken Kennedy is the Ann and John Doerr Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University. He founded the Department of Computer Science at Rice in 1984 and served as Chair until 1988. Throughout his career, he has conducted research on the optimization of code compiled from high-level languages, especially Fortran. He has been an active researcher on vectorization and parallelization. Kennedy was one of the proposers of the Center for Research on Parallel Computation, which he has directed since its inception in 1989.

Professor Kennedy has chaired and served as a member of a number of National Research Council/National Academy of Engineering bodies. He has also been appointed to advisory committees for the White House, Congress, the National Science Foundation, and DARPA. He has taken a leadership role in conferences and workshops, and serves on several editorial boards.

Ken Kennedy is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Association for Computing Machinery.

CRA A. Nico Habermann Award

Sheila Humphreys has been selected to receive the 1999 A. Nico Habermann Award. Dr. Humphreys is currently the Academic Coordinator for Student Matters, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. For the past twenty years, she has worked as a mentor and advocate for students from under-represented groups in computer science and engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

Sheila Humphreys founded and subsequently coordinated the Berkeley Computer Science Reentry Program in 1983, which became a model for programs to prepare women with non-traditional backgrounds for graduate study in Computer Science. In 1985, she initiated and organized the Excellence and Diversity Program in the Berkeley ECE Department to recruit and mentor graduate students, with an emphasis on underrepresented groups. Since 1990 she has worked with ECE graduate students to initiate and direct the Summer Undergraduate Program in Engineering Research (SUPERB) at Berkeley, an undergraduate research and mentoring program targeting underrepresented students which has been used as a model by other departments.

Sheila Humphreys is currently initiating a local science fair and an Internet-based information system to help local high school students prepare for admission to UC Berkeley under new Proposition 209 guidelines.

CRA's overall Awards Committee is chaired by Dan Reed (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign). He also chairs the Distinguished Service Award committee with members Fran Berman (University of California, San Diego) and Richard Muntz (University of California, Los Angeles). Corky Cartwright (Rice University) is chair of the Habermann Award Committee, with members Richard Tapia (Rice University) and Valerie Taylor (Northwestern University).