 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
New York, February 18, 2000. The Association for Computing Machinery today announced that Nancy G. Leveson has won its 1999 ACM Allen Newell Award for her pioneering work in establishing the foundations of software safety. The Newell award is supported by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and by individual contributions.
In their citation, the ACM noted that Dr. Leveson's research "built bridges between system engineering, software engineering, industrial psychology, and organizational sociology. Her book on software safety is used by practicing engineers in many engineering disciplines and in classes not only in computer science, but also in industrial, mechanical, and other engineering departments. Her contributions within computer science have also been broad, and have spanned the areas of fault tolerance, software engineering, human-computer interaction, and formal methods."
Creating a New discipline
Nancy G. Leveson's pioneering work grew out of a realization that many of the mechanical and electrical systems running society today have become too complex or time-critical to be controlled by humans or electromechanical devices alone. They must be controlled by computers. But the introduction of computers raises public safety concerns.
Responding to this challenge, Professor Leveson and her students established the basic definitions and formal foundations for this new field, and developed techniques to identify software-related system hazards, eliminate and control hazards through system and software design (including design of human-automation interaction), and verify safety in the resulting systems. She has been concerned not only with technical issues but also with the managerial and organizational problems that lead to accidents in high-tech systems.
Dr. Leveson's techniques, including formal modeling and analysis, are used worldwide and have had a major influence on industrial practice and government standards related to nuclear power, commercial and military aircraft, medical devices, and various transportation systems. Validating her great interdisciplinary contributions, the AIAA (American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics) in 1994 awarded her their Information Systems Award for contributions in space and aeronautical computer technology and science.
Throughout her career, she has been a vocal advocate for responsible engineering practices in the use of computers to control safety-critical systems and has raised consciousness about the ethical and moral issues involved in entrusting computers with responsibility for human life without adequate assurance that safety is not being compromised. Besides providing technical solutions to the problems involved in using computers, her detailed investigations of serious accidents have raised awareness among engineers and scientists of the potential dangers.
Background of Nancy G. Leveson
Nancy G. Leveson received all of her degrees, in math, management, and computer science, from UCLA (Ph.D. 1980) and spent her formative years as a Computer Science professor at the University of California, Irvine. Following that, she was Boeing Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, and is currently at MIT. She is the author of "Safeware: System Safety and Computers," Addison-Wesley, 1995, and of many technical papers. Her home page is at http://sunnyday.mit.edu/
About Allen Newell
The Newell award's namesake, Allen Newell, was a pioneer in artificial intelligence who developed the "rule-based" approach to problem solving. He taught at Carnegie Mellon and played a key role in developing the computer science department there. Among his many awards are the ACM's Turing Award and the Franklin Institute's Louis E. Levy medal. With Gordon Bell, Newell wrote Computer Structures, a classic computer science text. Newell died in 1992.
About the ACM
Founded in 1947, ACM (www.acm.org) is the world's first educational and scientific computing society. With more than 80,000 members worldwide, a dynamic series of authoritative publications, a wide range of special interest groups (SIGs), and an outstanding array of conferences, workshops and forums, ACM is a world-class resource for the entire technology field.
PRESS CONTACTS: Anne Wilson, 212-626-0505, annewilson@acm.org; Christopher Morgan , 617-262-2044, morgan@acm.org