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Nae's Newest Members Include 17 Computer Scientists

By Lawrence M. Fisher
February 13, 2017
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Seventeen computer scientists were among the 84 new members and 22 new foreign members recently announced by The National Academy of Engineering (NAE). 

The additions bring the organization’s total U.S. membership to 2,281, and the number of foreign members to 249.

Election to the National Academy of Engineering is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer.  Academy membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to "engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature" and to "the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/ implementing innovative approaches to engineering education."

Computer scientists among NAE’s newest members, and the reasons for their selection, include:

• Jingsheng Jason Cong, Chancellor's Professor and director, Center for Domain-Specific Computing, computer science department, at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was selected for his “pioneering contributions to application-specific programmable logic via innovations in field-programmable gate array synthesis.”
• Mark David Dankberg, chairman and chief executive officer of ViaSat Inc., Carlsbad, CA, for his “contributions to broadband Internet communications via satellite.”
• Whitfield Diffie, adviser, Black Ridge Technology, Redwood City, CA, “for the invention of public key cryptography and for broader contributions to privacy.” In 1996, Diffie shared the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award with Leonard Adleman, Martin Hellman, Ralph Merkle, Ronald Rivest, and Adi Shamir “for the conception and first effective realization of public-key cryptography.” He shared the 2015 ACM A.M. Turing Award with Martin Hellman for their critical contributions to modern cryptography.
• Ali H. Dogru, chief technologist and fellow, computational modeling technology, EXPEC ARC (Exploration and Petroleum Engineering Center – Advanced Research Center), Saudi Aramco/Saudi Arabian Oil Co., Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, “for the development of high-performance computing in hydrocarbon reservoir simulation.”
• Leonidas J. Guibas, Paul Pigott Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, computer science department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, “for contributions to data structures, algorithm analysis, and computational geometry.” Guibas was recipient in 2007 of the ACM AAAI Allen Newell Award “for pioneering work in computational geometry, with profound applications across an astonishingly broad range of Computer Science disciplines.”
• Julia Hirschberg, Percy K. and Vida L.W. Hudson Professor of Computer Science, and chair, department of computer science, Columbia University, New York City, “for contributions to the use of prosody in text-to-speech and spoken dialogue systems, and to audio browsing and retrieval.”
• Dina Katabi, professor, computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, “for contributions to network congestion control and to wireless communications.” In 2012, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award was bestowed upon Katabi “for her seminal contributions to the theory and practice of network congestion control and bandwidth allocation.”
• Tsu-Jae King Liu, TSMC Distinguished Professor in Microelectronics and chair, department of electrical engineering and computer sciences, University of California, Berkeley, “for contributions to the fin field effect transistor (FinFET) and its application to nanometer complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology.”
• Yann A. LeCun, director, AI Research, Facebook, New York City, “for developing convolutional neural networks and their applications in computer vision and other areas of artificial intelligence.”
• George T. Ligler, consultant, GTL Associates, Fuquay-Varina, NC, “for leadership and engineering innovation in specifying and implementing complex computer-based systems for aviation and the U.S. Census.”
• Steven B. Lipner, executive director, SAFECode, Wakefield, MA, “for developing and deploying practical methods for engineering secure software and computer systems.”
• George Varghese, Chancellor’s Professor, department of computer science, University of California, Los Angeles, “for network algorithmics that make the Internet faster, more secure, and more reliable.”
• Katherine A. Yelick, associate laboratory director, computer science, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and professor, electrical engineering and computer science, University of California, Berkeley, “for software innovation and leadership in high-performance computing.” Yelick received the ACM-W Athena Award in 2012 “for contributions to improving fundamental understanding and practice of parallel programming,” and the ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award for 2015 “for advancing the programmability of HPC systems, strategic national leadership, and mentorship in academia and government labs.”

Computer scientists among the new Foreign Members of NAE include:

• Chieko Asakawa, chief technology officer for accessibility research and technology, IBM Research Tokyo, IBM Japan Ltd., Tokyo, “for developing technologies for the visually impaired to access digital information.”
• Stéphane Mallat, professor, computer science, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, “for contributions to the fast wavelet transform and multiresolution signal processing.”
• Heung-Yeung Shum, executive vice president, technology and research, Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA, “for contributions to computer vision and computer graphics, and for leadership in industrial research and product development.”
• Joseph Sifakis, professor, School of Computer and Communication Science, École Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland, “for co-inventing model checking and for contributions to the development and verification of real-time and embedded systems.” He shared the ACM A.M. Turing Award for 2007 with Edmund Clarke and E. Allen Emerson, “for their role in developing Model-Checking into a highly effective verification technology that is widely adopted in the hardware and software industries.

Individuals in the newly elected class will be formally inducted during a ceremony at the NAE’s annual meeting in Washington D.C., on Oct. 8. 

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