CRA New Board of Directors Members

By Stacy Cholewinski

Incumbents

James D. Foley of Mitsubishi Electric Information Technology Center America rejoins the Board of Directors for his second term. He also continues as treasurer of the Computing Research Association. Foley's experience includes being a Fellow of both IEEE and ACM, serving on various editorial boards, and co-authoring three books. He was also named "Most likely to make students want to grow up to be professors" (Georgia Tech College of Computing Graduate Student Committee Award, 1992). He received his Ph.D. in Computer, Information, and Control Engineering from the University of Michigan.

His supporting statement included the following:

"Having lived in academia for many years and now in industrial research for nearly three years, I would want to continue and strengthen CRA's traditional role as an interface between these two interdependent worlds by way of Snowbird sessions and special workshops. I will continue to be active in recruiting and retaining industrial labs as CRA members. As this is best done by ensuring that industrial labs perceive value in CRA, I will work as an executive committee member to ensure that our programs provide appropriate value."

Daniel A. Reed has been very active in CRA's Government Affairs program and takes over this year as Chair of the committee. His past experience includes being the Review Committee Chair for the Presidential IT Advisory Commission, a member of an NSF CISE Advisory Committee, and a member of the Executive Committee of the NSF PACI National Computational Science Alliance. He was also awarded the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award.

He believes, "[that] with the recent PITAC report and IT2 Initiative, we are poised to move computing to the forefront of the national research agenda. However, we must act with unity and with vision."

Reed received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University and is now Professor and Head of the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include: high-performance computing, experimental performance analysis, parallel I/O, resource management, virtual environments, and mobile computing.

Lawrence Snyder earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the ACM and has served on several National Research Council Committees, and been a member of the NSF Advisory Committee of the Science and Technology Centers.

He believes that through community dialogue issues of relevance to CRA are raised and that CRA is obligated to be balanced and responsible. He states that "CRA has met this obligation well... [and that he] offers steady leadership balanced across CRA's four mission areas [to continue in] keeping computer research healthy... for both its intellectual and economic value.

At the University of Washington, Snyder's research interests are parallel algorithms and models of parallel computation, parallel architectures and interconnection networks, and parallel programming languages and environments.

He has served for several years on the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award Committee.

Mary Lou Soffa has served on the Board of Directors since 1996. Her involvement and dedication to CRA can be seen in her many activities, including being a member of the Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W), member of the Government Affairs Committee, member of the Executive Committee, and through the organization of a workshop on mentoring at Snowbird '98, as well as through being a panelist at the CRA Workshops for Academic Careers for Women in Computer Science and Engineering. She is currently the Vice Chair of the Board of Directors, beginning her second two-year term.

She "thinks it is most important that CRA play a major role in promoting computing research, and in educating and influencing governments and organizations about issues in computing research." She feels that "CRA should continue to actively address problems in the computing research community through its committees and programs."

Soffa received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh and is currently a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh. She is an ACM Fellow, was an Invited tutorial speaker at the Sixth International Symposium on Static Analysis, and received an NSF Professorship for Women, Berkeley.

John A. Stankovic is a BP America Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia. He is also currently Chair of the Computer Science Department. He has served as Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems, and Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Computing and Real-Time Systems journals. He is both a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM.

For CRA, he has chaired the electronic services committee, the communications committee, the professional awards committee, and ran the new chairs workshop at Snowbird '98.

Stankovic earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brown University. His Ph.D. thesis was published as a book in part of a series of the best Ph.D. theses in computer science.

Appointees:

Doris L. Carver is Professor of Computer Science at Louisiana State University. Carver has a doctorate degree in computer science from Texas A&M University. Her research interests are software engineering, formal methods, reverse engineering, and object-oriented software development methods.

Carver was the 1998 president of the IEEE Computer Society, and she is the 1999 IEEE Division V Director-Elect. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the IEEE Computer Society/ACM Software Engineering Coordinating Committee and a member of the IEEE Computer Society/ACM Steering Committee for Computing Curricula 2001. She has served as a IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor. She has also served on numerous conference committees and editorial boards. She currently serves as the associate Editor-in-Chief of COMPUTER. She is an IEEE Fellow. She is also currently serving as the IEEE-Computer Society Representative to the CRA Board.

Frank Tompa's awards and honors include being named a "leader in Canadian Science" by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and being a recipient of a University-Industry Synergy R&D Partnership Award from the Conference Board of Canada and NSERC.

He is the current chair of the CRA Canada Committee. He is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. And earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Toronto.

Tompa's supporting statement:

"In bringing together the needs of academia, business, and government, CRA plays a major role in advancing computer science and computer engineering as disciplines. Through the Board, I can apply my experiences from university life (as professor, department chair, member of senate) and from corporate participation (as researcher, founder of Open Text Corp., board member) to help guide CRA as it continues to fulfill its mandate. More specifically, I am interested in strengthening CRA's impressive contributions to collecting and disseminating information that highlights the impact and potential of computing research and to supporting the education and deployment of computing professionals."

Tompa replaces John Gannon on the CRA Board. He will serve out the rest of Gannon's term ending in 2001.

Newly Elected:

Lori A. Clarke's research interests include software verification and testing of distributed systems and software engineering infrastructure, particularly object management and interoperability. She states, " she [is] interested in addressing issues in certification/licensing of software professionals for safety critical applications and in exploring ways to increase participation by women and minorities."

She has served as ACM SIGSOFT Chair, Vice Chair, and Secretary-treasurer. She strengthened this community by serving as a member of the SIGSOFT executive committee for fourteen years and counting. Clark is also involved with IEEE Transactions On Software Engineering as an Associate Editor and ACM Transactions On Programming Languages and Systems.

She is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts at which she has been instrumental in building the computer science program. Her current work includes developing a dataflow analysis approach for verifying safety properties for distributed systems.

Her Ph.D. in Computer Science is from the University of Colorado.

Kathleen R. McKeown earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her current research interests include natural language processing, natural language generation, digital libraries, text summarization, and multimedia explanation. She is Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University and Chair of Columbia's Commission on the Status of Women

McKeown's experience includes being an elected officer for one of our affiliate societies, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence

She believes, "computer science is seeing major changes as interest in the field reaches all-time highs." She is "interested in the role CRA can play in keeping research funding levels high with a focus on basic research, in helping to change undergraduate education as enrollments grow, in defining issues for computer literacy, and in drawing women and minorities to the field."

William A. Woods joins the CRA Board of Directors as and Industrial Representative. He is a Principal Scientist, Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. He earned his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University. His research interests include knowledge representation, information retrieval, natural language processing, mechanical reasoning, speech understanding, artificial intelligence, and expert systems.

He has been involved with the National Research Council Panel on Applied Mathematics Research and Committee on Computerized Speech Recognition Technologies, as well as Alternatives for the Navy. He's worked with the Association for Computational Linguistics and is a Fellow of both the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Supporting statement:

"At a time when research agendas emphasize technology impact and practical benefits, it is important to also provide funding for projects aimed at fundamental advances with longer range significance. Many important problems will take years of continued research on fundamentals before they yield their most significant benefits. The integration of machine reasoning with language processing and speech understanding is an example of such a problem. It is important to make the investment to continue fundamental research in such areas, while we reap the benefits of past research, in order not to miss significant opportunities for the future."