■ J Strother Moore is CS department Moore has been department chair for
chair at UT Austin. 7 years. He is on the Board of Directors
He got his SB degree in math from MIT of the Computing Research Association,
in 1970 and his PhD from Edinburgh in is co-chair of the 2008 CRA Snowbird
1973. He is an AAAI Fellow, an ACM conference, and co-authored an influ-
Fellow, a member of the NAE, and a recip- ential CRA best practices paper on how
ient of the ACM Software System Award. universities should handle CS IP from
Since his PhD he has spent 17 years in industrially sponsored research ( www.cra.
industry and 17 years in academia, suc- org/reports/ip). Moore serves on the ACM
cessively at Xerox PARC, SRI, UT Austin, Educational Policy Committee, is active
Computational Logic, Inc. (which he in NCWIT, has co-chaired the Habermann
co-founded), and UT Austin again, where Award committee for 3 years, and is on
he now holds the Admiral B.R. Inman the advisory boards of the CS departments
Centennial Chair in Computing Theory. of Prairie View A&M, New Mexico State,
His primary research is in automatic and UT El Paso.
theorem proving and the verification of
hardware and software but his contribu-
tions are broader.

Moore loves programming. He put himself through MIT working for the MIT Laser Research Group (where he wrote FORTRAN to solve differential equations), for IBM (page fault simulation), and for TRW Systems Group (debugging Apollo lunar orbit insertion and navigation). During his last year at MIT, he worked full time at State Street Bank and Trust (coding mutual funds services in PL/1). Later, he and Bob Boyer invented a structure shared approach to resolution theorem proving, which helped usher in “logic programming,” and also a structured shared representation of edited text which became the basic representation in the Bravo and Word editors. Moore specified the INTER-LISP virtual machine. Boyer and Moore are the co-authors of a fast string searching algorithm, a linear-time majority vote algorithm, and (with Kaufmann) a series of theorem provers used in commercial hardware and software verification. Moore led the effort to produce the first verified software stack and designed, implemented, and verified the assembler, linker, and loader for it. He led the effort to verify the floating point division microcode for the AMD K5 and other commercial projects.

Austin, TX, USA

STATEMENT

■ Computing is the transformative sci- I have 7 years of executive experience ence of our age. Its effects on the other as chair of a large, top ranked CS depart-sciences, engineering, medicine, and ment, and ten years of experience as Chief business are acknowledged. But it will Scientist of a company I co-founded. I similarly transform all aspects of our have served 3 years on the Board of lives and cultures in the decades ahead. Directors of the CRA. That experience has Computing is transformative in part due to taught me some of the keys to institutional deep scientific reasons. leadership.

The workforce and diversity issues we A critical skill is listening more than one face are exacerbated by the misconcep- talks. Another is seizing the opportunity tion—which we helped promulgate—that to identify and articulate shared goals. computing is merely a technological A third is assembling a trusted team of enterprise as opposed to a deep scientific advisors and being open to their advice. one as well. A fourth is delegation of authority in areas

Our machines and their capabilities where the institution already performs are among the most exciting intellectual appropriately. And a fifth is leadership ventures in history. focus and follow-through on shared

I want to lead the ACM because I am goals—even if it means foregoing poten-passionate about the transformative nature tial new goals to achieve still-desired of computing and think the ACM is the old ones. organization that can get this vision out I am realistic enough to understand globally. But we must target the right audi- that in two years it is not possible to ences and deliver a compelling message. accomplish all the initiatives above. But The right audiences are national leaders, I can promise to bring the full force of my industrial leaders, and academic leaders experience, skill, energy, and passion to (including K- 12). The message is that the leadership of the ACM. the science of computing will transform everything they care about, whether it is a national economy, a business paradigm, or the meaning of excellence in a given discipline.

Other initiatives that are important to me include: the cultivation of top-notch volunteer ACM leadership in India and

China, broadening participation in the CS community at all levels, the branding of

ACM as the unbiased source of trusted reports on computing issues of global importance (e.g., the globalization report), and the opportunity to become the publisher of choice in computing.

Most of my professional life has been as a programmer and researcher. But my biography supports my dedication to teaching, my abiding concern for opening the CS workforce to all, and my interest in the healthy collaboration of academia and industry.