Barbara Simons: Internet Voting: An Idea whose Time has Not Come

Biographical Sketch

An expert on electronic voting, Dr. Barbara Simons was appointed to the Board of Advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. She had been a member of the National Workshop on Internet Voting that was convened at the request of President Clinton and produced a report on Internet Voting in 2001. She also participated on the Security Peer Review Group for the US Department of Defense’s Internet voting project (SERVE) and co-authored the report that led to the cancellation of SERVE because of security concerns. Simons co-chaired the ACM study of statewide databases of registered voters, and she co-authored the League of Women Voters report on election auditing. She recently published Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count?, a book on voting machines co-authored with Douglas Jones.

Simons was President of ACM from July 1998 until June 2000. She founded ACM’s US Public Policy Committee (USACM) in 1993 and served for many years as the Chair or co-Chair of USACM.

Simons is a Fellow of ACM and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2005 Simons became the first woman to receive the Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award from the College of Engineering of U.C. Berkeley. She received the Distinguished Service Award from Computing Research Association, the Making a Difference Award from ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computing and Society, the Norbert Wiener Award from Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, the Outstanding Contribution Award from ACM, and the Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She was selected by C|NET as one of its 26 Internet “Visionaries” and by Open Computing as one of the “Top 100 Women in Computing.”

Simons served on the President’s Export Council’s Subcommittee on Encryption and on the Information Technology-Sector of the President’s Council on the Year 2000 Conversion. She is on the Board of Directors of Verified Voting., and has also been on the boards of the U. C. Berkeley Engineering Fund, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Public Knowledge, and the Oxford Internet Institute, as well as the Advisory Council of the Public Interest Registry’s ORG.

Simons co-founded the Reentry Program for Women and Minorities in the U.C. Berkeley Computer Science Department. She is on the Boards of the Coalition to Diversify Computing and the Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in Information Technology, groups devoted to increasing participation in computer science of women and underrepresented minorities.

Simons earned her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation solved a major open problem in scheduling theory. In 1980, she became a Research Staff Member at IBM’s San Jose Research Center (now Almaden). In 1992, she joined IBM’s Applications Development Technology Institute as a Senior Programmer and subsequently served as Senior Technology Advisor for IBM Global Services. Her main areas of research have been compiler optimization, algorithm analysis and design, and scheduling theory. Her work on clock synchronization won an IBM Research Division Award. She holds several patents and has authored or co-authored a book and numerous technical papers. She is retired from IBM Research.

Jim Coplien: Reflections on Reflection

Biographical Sketch

Jim (“Cope”) Coplien is the father of Organizational Patterns, is one of the founders of the Software Pattern discipline, a pioneer in practical object-oriented design in the early 1990s and is a widely consulted authority, author, and trainer in the areas of software design and organizational improvements. With Trygve Reenskaug he is a co-originator of the Data, Context and Interaction (DCI) paradigm.

Cope is currently a partner in Gertrud & Cope, Mørdrup, Denmark, and in Scrum Foundation. His work ranges from programming and performance evaluation, to organizational improvement assessments, team- and enterprise-level organizational development and process improvement, and to consulting on system and software architecture.

He is a former researcher at the University of Manchester, and is a past holder of the Vloebergh Endowed Chair at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He has also held affiliations with Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and is a past professor at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. His current research lies in DCI, in the areas of design theory based on broken symmetries in design structures, and in “entropic patterns” of product portfolio management.

K. Rustan M. Leino: Staged Program Development

Biographical Sketch

K. Rustan M. Leino is a Principal Researcher in the Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) group at Microsoft Research. He is known for his work on programming methods and program verification tools.

At Microsoft Research, he has led the Spec# project, which brings enforced pre- and post-conditions to the .NET platform. He is the architect of the Boogie program verification framework, which underlies many program verifiers, including ones for C and Eiffel. A more recent research focus is the language and state-of-the-art verifier Dafny. With Dafny, Leino’s mission is not just to provide a tool that helps teach programmers to reason about programs, but also to provide a vision for the kind of automatic reasoning support that all future programming environments may provide. Previously, at DEC/Compaq SRC, Leino led the ESC/Java project and worked on specifications on the pioneering ESC/Modula-3 project.

Before getting his Ph.D. at Caltech in 1995, Leino wrote and designed object-oriented software as a technical lead in the Windows NT group at Microsoft. Leino collects thinking puzzles on a popular web page and hosts the Verification Corner video show on channel9.msdn.com. In his spare time, he plays music and, recently having ended his tenure as cardio exercise class instructor, is trying to learn to dance.

Rob Pike: Go at Google

Biographical Sketch

Rob Pike is a Distinguished Engineer at Google, Inc. He works on distributed systems, data mining, programming languages, and software development tools. Most recently he has been a co-designer and developer of the Go programming language. Before Google, Rob was a member of the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs, the lab that developed Unix. While there, he worked on computer graphics, user interfaces, languages, concurrent programming, and distributed systems. He was an architect of the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems and is the co-author with Brian Kernighan of The Unix Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming. Other details of his life appear on line but vary in veracity.

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