Institute Professor Barbara Liskov to receive 2018 Computer Pioneer Award

MIT Institute Professor Barbara Liskov

EECS Staff

The IEEE Computer Society has named Institute Professor Barbara Liskov as the recipient of is 2018 Computer Pioneer Award.

The society gives the award in recognition of significant contributions to early concepts and developments that have clearly advanced the state of the art in computing. Specifically, Liskov is being honored for her "pioneering data abstraction, polymorphism, and support for fault tolerance and distributed computing in the programming languages CLU and Argus,” according to the society’s announcement.  

Liskov, a long-time EECS faculty member, is head of the Programming Methodology Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Her research interests include distributed and parallel systems, programming methodology, and programming languages.  

She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and National Inventors Hall of Fame. She is a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and a charter fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.

She has also received the ACM Turing Award, the IEEE John von Neumann Medal, an achievement award from the ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN), and a lifetime achievement award from the Society of Women Engineers. In 2003, Discover Magazine named her one of the 50 most important women in science.

Liskov received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from University of California Berkeley and master’s and PhD degrees in computer science from Stanford University. She was one of the first women in the United States to earn a doctorate in computer science.

The IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors established the Computer Pioneer Award in 1981 to recognize individuals whose efforts influenced the computer industry. The award is presented to people whose main contribution to the concepts and development of the computer field was made at least 15 years earlier.

Liskov will receive the Computer Pioneer Award at the 2019 Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC), held in conjunction with SEMICON West in San Francisco in July 2019. The award consists of a silver medal and a speaking invitation.