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Grid Pioneer Foster Named 2011 Kanai Award Winner

T he University of Chi-cago’s Ian T. Foster has been named winner of the 2011 IEEE Com-

puter Societ y Tsutomu Ka na i Award for his accomplishments in grid computing. The primary focus of Foster’s research has been the acceleration of discovery in a net-worked world. In partnership with many others, notably Carl Kessel-man and Steven Tuecke, Foster developed and promulgated the concepts and methods that under-pin grid computing. These methods allow computing to be delivered reliably and securely on demand, as a service, and permit the formation and operation of virtual organiza-tions linking people and resources worldwide.

Foster won the Kanai Award “for pioneering research in grid com-puting, integrating geographically distributed instruments, computers, and data.”

Foster is the Arthur Holly Comp-ton Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago and an Argonne Distin-guished Fellow at Argonne National Laboratory. He is also the director of the Computation Institute, a joint effort of Argonne and the University of Chicago.

Foster received a BS from the Uni-versity of Canterbury, New Zealand,

and a PhD from Imperial College, United Kingdom, both in computer science. He is a fellow of the Ameri-can Association for the Advancement of Science, Association for Comput-ing Machinery, and British Computer Society.

His other awards include the Global Information Infrastructure Next-Generation Award, the British Computer Society’s Lovelace Medal,R&D Magazine’s Innovator of the Year,

and honorary doctorates from the University of Canterbury, New Zea-land, and CINVESTAV, Mexico. Foster also cofounded Univa, a company established to deliver grid and cloud computing solutions.

TSUTOMU KANAI AWARDThe Tsutomu Kanai Award rec-

ognizes major contributions to state-of-the-art distributed computing systems and their applications. Estab-lished by the IEEE Computer Society in 1997 through a generous endowment from Hitachi, the award is named in honor of Tsutomu Kanai, who served as Hitachi’s president for 30 years.

The Kanai award consists of a crys-tal model, certificate, and $10,000 honorarium. Read more about the Kanai and other Computer Society awards at www.computer.org/portal/web/awards/kanai.

Ian T. Foster led the creation of Globus Online

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Arthur W. Astrin chairs Body Area Net- work Task Group 6 for the IEEE 802.15 standard.

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Communication engineer Arthur W. Astrin, whose innovations and efforts

contributed to the birth and devel-opment of the Wi-Fi industry, was recently named winner of the 2011 IEEE Computer Society Hans Karls-son Award.

Astrin received the award “for leadership and diplomatic skills applied to LAN/MAN wireless personal area network standards; mediating rivalry of competing corporate entities and personal aspirations by promoting the value of IEEE wireless standards-based approaches.”

Astrin has held technical and management positions at Apple, IBM, Siemens, ROLM, Memorex, and Citi-corp. At Apple, he boosted the Wi-Fi industry by developing AirPort, the first consumer-oriented, wireless networking solution for PCs. He also worked toward creating industry

compatibility in testing compliance for the IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi standard. He has taught communication and computer engineering at San Jose State University and the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1967, Astrin built the first “bit-slice” architecture computer using transistor-transistor logic technol-ogy and received an award from the US Navy’s Admiral Grace Hopper. He holds seven US patents and received

a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of California, San Diego, and a PhD in communica-tion engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles.

HANS KARLSSON AWARDEstablished in 1992 in memory

of Hans Karlsson, chairman and father of the IEEE 1301 family of standards, the Karlsson Award is one of the Computer Society’s highest honors. The award recognizes outstanding skills and dedication to diplomacy, team facilitation, and joint achievement in the development or promotion of standards in the computer industry where individual aspirations, corporate competition, and organizational rivalry could otherwise be counter to the benefit of society. Learn more about the Karlsson Award and other Computer Society awards at www.computer.org/portal/web/awards/karlsson.

Astrin Receives Hans Karlsson Award

R ice University computer scientist Moshe Vardi has been named winner of the

IEEE Computer Society’s 2011 Harry H. Goode Award.

Vardi, R ice’s Karen Ostrum George Professor in Computational Engineering and director of Rice’s Ken Kennedy Institute for Informa-tion Technology, is a noted logician and member of the National Acad-emy of Engineering. He also serves as editor in chief of the Associa-tion of Computing Machinery’s Communications of the ACM. Vardi was honored for his “fundamental and lasting contributions to the

development of logic as a unify-ing foundational framework and a tool for modeling computational systems.”

Logic, which is sometimes called “the calculus of computer science,” is fundamental to research areas such as artificial intelligence, com-putational complexity, distributed computing, database systems, design verification, programming languages, and software engineering. Using logic as a framework, Vardi has performed research in intelligent databases, multiagent systems, and automated reasoning.

He was honored with the 2010 Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award for his leadership, including the organization of an influential 2006 report on overseas job out-

Vardi Receives Goode Award

Moshe Vardi is a noted logician and member of the National Academy of Engineering.

LISTEN TO GRADY BOOCH“On Architecture”

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85MAY 2011

sourcing in the software industry. The report dispelled some myths about software offshoring and reinforced the case that comput-ing plays a fundamental role in defining success in the global economy.

Vardi earned a doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is the author or coauthor of approxi-mately 400 articles and two books. Vardi’s other awards include the 2010 Distinguished Service Award from the Computing Research Asso-

HARRY H. GOODE AWARDThe Goode Award was estab-

lished to recognize achievement in the information-processing field—either a single contribution of theory, design, or technique of outstanding signifi cance or the accumulation of important contributions on theory or practice over an extended period.

Further information about the Goode Award, including a list of past recipients, can be found at: www.computer.org/portal/web/awards/harrygoode.

ciation, the 2000 Goedel Prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer sciences, and the 2008 ACM Presidential Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science, the European Academy of Sciences, and the Academia Europea. Vardi is also a Guggenheim Fellow and a fellow of IEEE, the ACM, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

Total enrollments among US computer science under-graduates increased 10

percent in 2010, according to the Computing Research Association’s annual Taulbee Survey. This is the third straight year of increases in total enrollment and may indi-cate that the post “dot-com crash” decline in undergraduate comput-ing program enrollments is over.

The CRA, of which the IEEE Com-puter Society is a member, conducts the survey each year to document trends in student enrollment, degree production, employment of graduates, and faculty salaries in PhD-granting departments of computer science, computer engineering, and informa-tion sciences in the United States and Canada.

SPECIFIC SURVEY FINDINGSOverall, bachelor’s degree produc-

tion in computer science, computer engineering, and information sciences departments in 2010 rose nearly 11 percent compared to 2009. Bachelor’s degree production in computer sci-ence departments was up more than 9 percent. The increases in new stu-dents observed during each of the past two years have resulted in increased

degree production, a turnaround from the past several years of declining bachelor’s degree production.

The 2010 Taulbee Survey also found that PhD production in com-puting programs held steady in 2009-2010. Among CRA member schools, the share of bachelor’s degrees in computer science granted to females rose to 13.8 percent in 2010, an increase of 2.5 percentage points over 2009. The share of bach-elor’s degrees in computer science granted to minority students held nearly steady at 10.3 percent in 2010.

The full report, which also includes information about faculty size, demographics and salaries, graduate student support, and research expen-ditures, will be available soon on the CRA website.

COMPUTING RESEARCH ASSOCIATION

The CRA is an association of more than 200 North American academic departments of computer science, computer engineering, and related fields; laboratories and centers in industry, government, and aca-demia engaging in basic computing research; and affi liated professional societies.

The Taulbee Survey is named after the University of Pittsburgh’s Orrin E. Taulbee, who conducted the surveys from 1974 to 1984 for the Computer Science Board (the predecessor orga-nization to the Computing Research Association). Learn more about the CRA and its programs at www.cra.org.

CS&E Undergraduate Numbers Up