MIT's Liskov wins Turing Award

The first American woman to earn a Ph.D in computer science has won the Association for Computing Machinery's AM Turing Award. Barbara Liskov, who currently heads the Programming Methodology Group in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has helmed innovations in software design that provide the underpinnings of every significant programming language introduced since 1975 -- not to mention much of the Internet as you know it.

Dr. Liskov's earliest work brought the concept of data abstraction into a central role in software engineering, making development and maintenance a much easier proposition; she created the CLU proto-OOP programming language as part of her teaching workload at MIT in 1974 and 1975. Her later work on distributed system design makes possible scalable systems with millions of concurrent users -- a crucial component of the very largest Web sites (think search engines). Currently, she's pondering ways of improving system fault tolerance, especially as it relates to arbitrary failures, including such problems as errors and intrusions.

The Turing Award, which includes a $250,000 prize, is regularly described as the Nobel Prize for computing research. It is the ACM's highest honor.

3 Responses to MIT's Liskov wins Turing Award

© 1998-2024 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy.