Greg Andrews

Greg Andrews is a Professor of Computer Science at The University of Arizona. His research is on programming languages and software systems for parallel and distributed computing. He has written three books on these topics and received two distinguished teaching awards from the College of Science at Arizona. He is currently Co-Principal Investigator of a large, NSF-funded project to build a cyberinfrastructure that enables solving grand challenge problems in the plant sciences. Professor Andrews was Head of Computer Science at Arizona from 1986-93 and 2006-08. From 2003-05 he was at NSF, where he was the initial Division Director of Computer and Network Systems. Professor Andrews was on the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association from 1991-98, and he was on the Council of the Computing Community Consortium from 2006-08. He is a Fellow of the ACM. [ More ]

Eric Brewer

Eric Brewer is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he leads research on scalable systems, technology for developing regions, and parallel computing. In 1996, he founded Inktomi Corporation based on a research prototype, and helped lead it onto the NASDAQ 100 before it was bought by Yahoo! in March 2003.  In 2000, working with President Clinton, Dr. Brewer led the creation of USA.gov, the official portal of the Federal government.  He was named a "Global Leader for Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum, by the Industry Standard as the "most influential person on the architecture of the Internet."  He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the ACM. [ More ]

Rodney Brooks

Rodney Brooks is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He is the former director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory which has approximately 450 PhD students working in all areas of computer science research.  His own research is on computer vision, mobile robots (including planetary explorers and military robots), robots that can interact with and work together with humans, and robots that can grasp and manipulate objects. Professor Brooks was a co-founder, and until 2008 the CTO, of iRobot Corporation, which has supplied over 2,000 robots to US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and over 3,000,000 home cleaning robots to American consumers.  He is currently on leave from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as founder of a new company, Heartland Robotics, which will improve the productivity and competitiveness of US manufacturing workers by empowering them with robots that they can control and program themselves, and interact with safely as they work together cooperatively. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the ACM, the AAAS, and the AAAI. [ More ]

Deborah Estrin

Deborah Estrin is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at UCLA. She holds the Jon Postel Chair in Computer Networks, and is Founding Director of the National Science Foundation funded Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS). Professor Estrin currently explores Mobile Personal Sensing systems that leverage the location, image, and attached-sensor data streams available globally from mobile phones; with particular emphasis on environmental health applications and on privacy-aware architectures. Her earlier research addressed Internet protocol design and scaling.  Professor Estrin serves on the National Research Council's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB). She has served on the NSF National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) Advisory board, the NSF CISE Advisory Committee, and DARPA-ISAT. She was selected as the first ACM-W Athena Lecturer in 2006 and was awarded the Anita Borg Institute's Women of Vision Award for Innovation in 2007. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the IEEE, ACM, and AAAS. She was granted Doctor Honoris Causa from EPFL in 2008. [ More ]

Susan L. Graham

Susan L. Graham is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Emerita and a Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research includes programming language implementation, software tools, software development environments, and high-performance computing. Professor Graham was the founding editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. She has served on numerous advisory committees, including the U.S. President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). She was the Chief Computer Scientist for the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure from 1997 to 2005. Currently she is vice-chair of the NSF-sponsored Computing Community Consortium Council. Professor Graham is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among her honors are the ACM SIGPLAN Career Programming Language Achievement Award (2000), the ACM Distinguished Service Award (2006), and the Harvard Medal (2008). [ More ]

Patrick Hanrahan

Pat Hanrahan is the CANON Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University where he teaches computer graphics. His current research involves visualization, image synthesis, virtual worlds, and graphics systems and architectures. Before joining Stanford he was a faculty member at Princeton. He has also worked at Pixar where he developed volume rendering software and was the chief architect of the RenderMan(TM) Interface - a protocol that allows modeling programs to describe scenes to high quality rendering programs. Previous to Pixar he directed the 3D computer graphics group in the Computer Graphics Laboratory at New York Institute of Technology. Professor Hanrahan has received three university teaching awards. He has received two Academy Awards for Science and Technology, the Spirit of America Creativity Award, the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, the SIGGRAPH Stephen A. Coons Award and the IEEE Visualization Career Award. He was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [ More ]

Chris Johnson

Chris Johnson directs the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute at the University of Utah where he is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and holds faculty appointments in the Departments of Physics and Bioengineering. His research interests are in the areas of scientific computing and scientific visualization. Dr. Johnson founded the SCI research group in 1992, which has since grown to become the SCI Institute employing over 145 faculty, staff and students. Professor Johnson serves on several international journal editorial boards, as well as on advisory boards to several national research centers. Professor Johnson has received several awards, including the NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow (PFF) award from President Clinton in 1995 and the Governor's Medal for Science and Technology from Governor Michael Leavitt in 1999. He is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. [ More ]

David Kaeli

David Kaeli is Director of the Northeastern University Computer Architecture Research Laboratory (NUCAR) and co-leader of the Northeastern University Institute for Information Assurance (IIA). He is also a Research Thrust Leader for the NSF Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems (CenSSIS) and an IEEE Fellow. He is presently a full professor in the ECE Department at Northeastern University. Prior to joining Northeastern University, Dr. Kaeli was employed at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. [ More ]

Jon Kleinberg

Jon Kleinberg is on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Cornell University, where he holds the position of Tisch University Professor. His research focuses on issues at the interface of networks and information, with an emphasis on the social and information networks that underpin the Web and other on-line media. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He serves on the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Advisory Committee of the National Science Foundation, and the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the National Research Council. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Packard Foundation Fellowship, and a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Nevanlinna Prize from the International Mathematical Union, and the National Academy of Sciences Award for Initiatives in Research. [ More ]

Daphne Koller

Daphne Koller is a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. Her main research focus is in developing and using machine learning and probabilistic methods to model and analyze complex systems, and she is particularly interested in using these techniques to help us understand biological systems and to help computers perceive the world around us. Professor Koller is the author of over 150 refereed publications, which have appeared in venues that include Science, Nature Genetics, and the Journal of Games and Economic Behavior. She is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and has received numerous awards, including the Sloan Foundation Faculty Fellowship in 1996, the ONR Young Investigator Award in 1998, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from President Clinton in 1999, the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 2001, the Cox Medal for excellence in fostering undergraduate research at Stanford in 2003, the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004 and the first-ever ACM/Infosys award in 2008. [ More ]

Ed Lazowska

Ed Lazowska holds the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington.  His research and teaching concern the design, implementation, and analysis of high performance computing and communication systems.  Professor Lazowska is a member of the Microsoft Research Technical Advisory Board, and serves as a board member or technical advisor to a number of high-tech companies and venture firms.  He co-chaired the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee from 2003-05, and chairs the Computing Community Consortium, an effort sponsored by the National Science Foundation to engage the computing research community in envisioning more audacious research challenges.  He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. [ More ]

Peter Lee

Peter Lee is Professor and Head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He has an extensive record of research contributions in areas related to software reliability, program analysis, security, and language design. Several of his papers have received "test of time" awards, such as the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award, for seminal contributions to the field. As a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and incoming Chair of the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association, Peter Lee is called upon in diverse venues for his expertise in computing research and education. [ More ]

Barbara Liskov

has just been named the 2008 ACM A. M. Turing Award Winner; the award, named for British mathematician Alan M. Turing, is widely considered to be the "Nobel Prize in Computing."

Barbara Liskov is an Institute Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and also Associate Provost for Faculty Equity. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the ACM. She received the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Language Achievement Award in 2008, the IEEE Von Neumann medal in 2004, a lifetime achievement award from the Society of Women Engineers in 1996, and in 2003 was named one of the 50 most important women in science by Discover Magazine. Her research interests include distributed systems, replication algorithms to provide fault-tolerance, programming methodology, and programming languages. Her current research projects include Byzantine-fault-tolerant storage systems, peer-to-peer computing, and support for automatic deployment of software upgrades in large-scale distributed systems. [ More ]

Gene Myers

Gene Myers is a Group Leader at the new Janelia Farms Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the DC metro area. He was one of the first computer scientists to enter the field of computational molecular biology in the early 80's. In 1995 he and Jim Weber proposed the whole genome shotgun sequencing of the human genome, and in 1998 he joined the founding Celera team to accomplish that mission. At Celera his team produced reconstructions of the Drosophila, Human, Mouse, and Mosquito genomes in a two year time frame, radically altering the way sequencing is done today. Dr. Myers was awarded the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award in 2002 and the International Max Planck Research Prize in 2004. In 2003 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and in 2006 he was elected to the German National Academy of Science, Leopoldina. His current interest is in developing algorithms and software for the automatic interpretation of images produced by light and electron microscopy of stained samples with a particular emphasis on building 3D and 4D "atlases" of brains, developing organisms, and cellular processes with the aim of making molecular biology a "high-throughput" science. [ More ]

Larry Smarr

Larry Smarr became founding director in 2000 of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a University of California San Diego/UC Irvine partnership. He holds the Harry E. Gruber professorship in the Jacobs School's Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD. For the previous 15 years as founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications Dr. Smarr helped drive major developments in the planetary information infrastructure: the Internet, the Web, scientific visualization, virtual reality, and global telepresence. For the last six years he has led the NSF OptIPuter project. Dr. Smarr was a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee for President Clinton and served until 2005 on the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health and the NASA Advisory Council. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2006 he received the IEEE Computer Society Tsutomu Kanai Award for distributed computing systems achievements. His views have been quoted in Science, Nature, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, Wired, Fortune, and Business Week. [ More ]

Alfred Spector

Alfred Spector is Vice President of Google Research and Special Initiatives. Among the special initiatives are Google's efforts in health, open source software, and university relations.  Previously, Dr. Spector was Vice President of Strategy and Technology for IBM's software business, and prior to that, he was Vice President of Services and Software Research across IBM. He was also founder and CEO of Transarc Corporation, a pioneer in distributed transaction processing and wide area file systems, and was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM, and the recipient of the 2001 IEEE Computer Society's Tsutomu Kanai Award for work in scalable architectures and distributed systems. [ More ]

Luis von Ahn

Luis von Ahn is on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Sloan Fellowship, and a Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship. He has been named one of the 50 Best Minds in Science by Discover Magazine, one of the "Brilliant 10" scientists of 2006 by Popular Science Magazine, one of the 50 most influential people in technology by Silicon.com, and one of the Top Innovators in the Arts and Sciences by Smithsonian Magazine. His research interests include encouraging people to do work for free, as well as catching and thwarting cheaters in online environments. [ More ]