Wing and Lickel Recognized for Service

By CRA

The CRA Board of Directors has selected Jeannette M. Wing, President's Professor of Computer Science and Head, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University, to receive its 2011 Distinguished Service Award. The award will be presented to Professor Wing at the ACM Awards Banquet in San Jose on June 4.

CRA makes this award, usually annually, to someone who has made an outstanding service contribution to the computing research community. This award recognizes service in the areas of government affairs, professional societies, publications or conferences, and leadership that has a major impact on computing research.

Professor Wing was nominated for the award for her national and international thought leadership with respect to Computational Thinking, and for her extraordinary performance as NSF Assistant Director for CISE from 2007-10. Articulating the notion of Computational Thinking has been influential in identifying howcomputing research is indeed far different from computing per se. That is, the way key problems—in biology and other sciences, for example—are considered now is in terms of core computational notions such as abstraction, exponentials, and more.

Wing’s leadership at NSF came at a crucial time both scientifically and politically. She has been deeply involved in a set of major NSF programs including Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation, Expeditions in Computing, Trustworthy Computing, Data-Intensive Computing, and more. These have helped push research in numerous new directions, and they have been essential in further establishing computing research as a cornerstone of NSF’s full research portfolio and as a critical dimension of America’s innovation economy. In the words of Peter Lee, Managing Director of MicrosoftResearch Redmond,“[Simply,] Jeannette's service work has touched, in a tangible and positive way, virtually every working academic  computer science researcher.”

The CRA Board of Directors has selected Charles Lickel, Retired Executive Vice President, Global Research Software Strategy, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, to receive the 2011 A. Nico Habermann Award. The award is given for outstanding contributions aimed at increasing the numbers and/or successes of underrepresented groups in the computing research community.

Lickel’s accomplishments have had an impact at the national, local, and individual levels for underrepresented groups, and particularly for researchers in the GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered) computing community. Within IBM Research, he developed a series of leadership conferences for the GLBT employees. These conferences led to his appointment by the UCLA Anderson School of Business to create a leadership institute in which employees of companies, such as Microsoft and Pepsi, worked with top professors and business leaders to learn to become effective leaders. His leadership and efforts to develop GLBT leaders and act as their role model resulted in his being honored as one of the Gay Financial Network 25 in 2001.

Outside IBM, in addition to his work at the UCLA Anderson School of Business, Lickel also has had an impact on computer science programs within academia—such as Arizona State University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, SUNY Albany, and Pace University—through his work on their advisory councils. In 2009, he was awarded the Harvey Milk Alumni Award from SUNY Albany for his outstanding contributions. He has had a significant impact on the universities, their programs, and the students at these universities. In addition to working for the GLBT community, Lickel also has been committed to other underrepresented groups in computing and is highly regarded for his leadership within other organizations.

Dr. Lickel’s award will be presented at CRA’s biennial Conference at Snowbird in July 2012.