Barbara Liskov, MIT Institute Professor Emerita and CSAIL principal investigator, and Rodney Brooks, former CSAIL director, iRobot co-founder, and Robust.AI founder and CTO, were awarded Computer History Museum Fellow Awards this past June. The institution honored Liskov for shaping modern computing through her programming languages and system design research, while Brooks received his for influencing the field of robotics while considering its impact on humanity.
Each year, the Computer History Museum recognizes computing innovators. Past recipients include Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, inventor of the World Wide Web and former MIT professor Tim Berners-Lee, and Project MAC founders Marvin Minsky and Fernando Corbató.
Liskov’s Fellow Award recognizes her many groundbreaking programming achievements since she started at MIT in 1972. She designed and implemented CLU, the first language to support data abstraction, and Argus, which is the first high-level language to support the implementation of distributed programs. Liskov’s breakthroughs laid the foundation for languages like Java and C# to thrive today. As for her research in distributed systems, Liskov covered many aspects of operating systems and computation. One important contribution, done jointly with Miguel Castro, was the design of Byzantine fault tolerance, a technique that ensures that data entrusted to online storage is stored reliably and is available when needed — even when some components used to implement the storage system fail in arbitrary ways.
Brooks earned his Fellow Award for making many contributions to the development of autonomous robots, with his research in the 80s kickstarting the first wave of inexpensive mobile robot platforms with real-time performance. Brooks developed some of the first practical autonomous mobile robots, leading him to co-found iRobot. At his previous company, he pioneered the Roomba vacuum among other machines used for space exploration, military purposes, and in-home services, catalyzing further commercial activity in robotics. At MIT, Brooks led the AI lab from 1997 to 2003 and served as CSAIL director from 2003 to 2007.
Currently, Liskov focuses on distributed and parallel systems, programming methodology, and programming languages and systems. Her previous honors include being a National Academy of Engineering (NAE) member, a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM), the Society of Women Engineers' Achievement Award in 1996, the IEEE John von Neumann medal in 2004, and the A.M. Turing Award from ACM in 2009.
Brooks is now an executive at Robust.AI, a company that develops robots for logistics and manufacturing operations. His previous recognitions include being an NAE member, a Corresponding Member of the Australian Academy of Science, the EC C&C Foundation Award, and a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the ACM, and The Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering.
Liskov and Brooks will receive their Fellow Awards at a gala in the Computer History Museum this November.
