2015 CRA Board Election Results

By CRA Staff

CRA members have elected seven new members to its Board of Directors: Joel Emer, Stephanie Forrest, Michael Franklin, Greg Hager*, Farnam Jahanian and Vivek Sarkar. Five current board members were re-elected to the CRA Board: Sarita Adve, H.V. Jagadish, Margaret Martonosi, Greg Morrisett, and Kathryn McKinley. Their terms run from July 1, 2015 through June 30, 2018. Retiring from the Board as of June 30, 2015 are Corinna Cortes, Jeanne Ferrante, Lance Fortnow, Eric Grimson, and J Moore. CRA thanks them all for contributions during their service on the board.

* Hager is currently holding a non-elected position on the Board.

Joel Emer

Dr. Joel S. Emer is a Senior Distinguished Research Scientist in Nvidia's Architecture Research group. He is responsible for exploration of future architectures as well as modeling and analysis methodologies. In his spare time, he is a Professor of the Practice at MIT, where he teaches computer architecture and supervises graduate students. Prior to joining Nvidia he worked at Intel where he was an Intel Fellow and Director of Microarchitecture Research. Even earlier, he worked at Compaq and Digital Equipment Corporation.

Dr. Emer has held various research and advanced development positions investigating processor microarchitecture and developing performance modeling and evaluation techniques. He has made architectural contributions to a number of VAX, Alpha and X86 processors and is recognized as one of the developers of the widely employed quantitative approach to processor performance evaluation. More recently, he has been recognized for his contributions in the advancement of simultaneous multithreading technology, processor reliability analysis, cache organization and spatial architectures.

Dr. Emer received a bachelor's degree with highest honors in electrical engineering in 1974, and his master's degree in 1975 -- both from Purdue University. He earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois in 1979. He has received numerous public recognitions, including being named a Fellow of both the ACM and IEEE, and he was the 2009 recipient of the Eckert-Mauchly award for lifetime contributions in computer architecture.

Stephanie Forrest

Stephanie Forrest is Regents Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and a member of the Santa Fe Institute External Faculty. Her interdisciplinary research studies adaptive systems and includes biological modeling (immunology and evolutionary processes), computer security, and software engineering. Professor Forrest received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer and Communication Sciences from the University of Michigan and a B.A. from St. John's College. At UNM, she served as Dept. Chair 2006-2011, and at SFI she has served as Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs and Co-Chair of the Science Board. She has received several awards and honors, including: the Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lectureship (2013), the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award (2011), and the Presidential Young Investigator Award (1991). She is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Michael Franklin

Michael Franklin is the Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Computer Science and Chair of Computer Science at UC Berkeley where he also serves as Director of the Algorithms, Machines and People Lab (AMPLab). The Berkeley AMPLab is integrating machine learning, scalable computing, and human computation to develop a next generation Big Data analytics platform. Components of this platform, including the Spark and Shark analytics frameworks and the Mesos virtualization layer have become key parts of the emerging Big Data ecosystem. AMPLab is supported by more than two dozen leading companies including founding sponsors Amazon Web Services, Google, and SAP and received an NSF Expeditions in Computing award, which was announced by the White House in 2012. Franklin was founder and CTO of Truviso, a real-time data analytics company acquired by Cisco Systems. He is an ACM Fellow and two-time winner of the ACM SIGMOD Test of Time Award.

Farnam Jahanian

Farnam Jahanian is the Vice President for Research at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) where he is responsible for nurturing excellence in research, scholarship and creative activities. Recently appointed as CMU’s Provost, he will begin this position in June 2015. Prior to CMU, Jahanian led the National Science Foundation Directorate for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) from 2011 to 2014. He guided CISE, with a budget of almost $900 million, in its mission to advance scientific discovery and engineering innovation through its support of fundamental research and transformative advances in cyberinfrastructure. Previously, Jahanian was the Edward S. Davidson Collegiate Professor at the University of Michigan where he served as Chair for Computer Science and Engineering from 2007 to 2011 and as Director of the Software Systems Laboratory from 1997 to 2000. His research on Internet infrastructure security formed the basis for the Internet security company Arbor Networks, which he co-founded in 2001 and where he served as Chairman until its acquisition in 2010. He has testified before Congress on a broad range of topics, including cybersecurity, next generation computing, and big data. Jahanian received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Vivek Sarkar

Vivek Sarkar is Professor and Chair of Computer Science at Rice University. He conducts research in multiple aspects of parallel software including programming languages, program analysis, compiler optimizations and runtimes for parallel and high performance computer systems. He currently leads the Habanero Extreme Scale Software Research Laboratory at Rice University, and serves as Associate Director of the NSF Expeditions Center for Domain-Specific Computing. Prior to joining Rice in July 2007, Vivek was Senior Manager of Programming Technologies at IBM Research. His responsibilities at IBM included leading IBM’s research efforts in programming model, tools, and productivity in the PERCS project during 2002- 2007 as part of the DARPA High Productivity Computing System program. His prior research projects include the X10 programming language, the Jikes Research Virtual Machine for the Java language, the ASTI optimizer used in IBM’s XL Fortran product compilers, the PTRAN automatic parallelization system, and profile-directed partitioning and scheduling of Sisal programs. In 1997, he was on sabbatical as a visiting associate professor at MIT, where he was a founding member of the MIT Raw multicore project. Vivek became a member of the IBM Academy of Technology in 1995, the E.D. Butcher Chair in Engineering at Rice University in 2007, and was inducted as an ACM Fellow in 2008. He holds a B.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, an M.S. degree from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. Vivek has been serving as a member of the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee (ASCAC) since 2009.