Professor Barbara Liskov has just become the second woman to receive the Association for Computing Machinery’s A. M. Turing Award. First awarded in 1966, the Turing is considered the “Nobel Prize of computing.” The other CSAIL PIs to have won the award are Ron Rivest (2002), Butler Lampson (1992) and Fernando J. Corbató (1990).
Liskov is no stranger to pioneering in her field. After becoming the first woman in the United States to be awarded a PhD from a computer science department in 1968, she has gone on to become a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the ACM. Last summer, she was named an Institute Professor, MIT’s highest honor, and in 2004 she was awarded the IEEE John von Neumann medal for outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology.
Says CSAIL’s Director, Victor Zue, “For nearly four decades, Barbara has been a seminal leader in programming languages and systems research at MIT, combining great intellectual insights with practicality, including the development of languages to support data abstraction, object-oriented programming, and her research on distributed computing and Byzantine Fault Tolerance. All of us at CSAIL are extremely pleased and proud of this latest accolade, the highest honor in computer science.” The award will be officially presented in San Diego on June 27th.
To learn more about Professor Liskov, please visit her personal webpage; more information about the award can be found here and here.