memBeRs At LARGe (7/1/12 – 6/30/16)

FENG ZHAO Microsoft research asia, beijing china

ERIC ALLMAN Sendmail, inc. chief Science officer emeryville, ca, USa

Biography

Feng Zhao is an assistant managing
director at Microsoft Research Asia,
responsible for the hardware, mobile
and sensing, software analytics,
systems, and networking research
areas. He is also an adjunct profes-
sor at Shanghai Jiaotong University,
Hong Kong University of Science
and Technology, and the University
of Washington. Prior to joining
MSR-Asia in 2009, he was a Principal
Researcher at Microsoft Research
Redmond (2004–2009), and founded
the Networked Embedded Comput-
ing Group. His research has focused
on wireless sensor networks, energy-
efficient computing, and mobile sys-
tems. He has authored or co-authored
over 100 technical papers and books,
including a book, Wireless Sensor
Networks: An Information Processing
Approach, by Morgan Kaufmann.
An ACM member for over 25 years,
Feng was the founding Editor-In-
Chief of ACM Transactions on Sensor
Networks (2003–2010), and founded
the ACM/IEEE IPSN conference.
Feng served on ACM SIGBED Execu-
tive Committee (2004–2010), as
TPC Co-Chair for ACM Sensys’05,
and on the Steering Committee
for CPSWeek (2007–). In 2008, he
worked with USENIX and ACM to
help start a new workshop series,
HotPower, focusing on the emerg-
ing topic of sustainable computing.
Feng received his BS from Shang-
hai Jiaotong University (1984), and
MS and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineer-
ing and Computer Science from
MIT (1988 and 1992, respectively).
He taught at Ohio State University
as a tenured Associate Professor in
Computer Science 1992–1999, and
at Stanford University as a Consult-
ing Professor of Computer Science
1999–2006. He was a Principal Sci-
entist at Xerox PARC 1997–2004.

An IEEE Fellow and ACM Distinguished Engineer, Feng received a Sloan Research Fellowship (1994) and NSF and ONR Young Investigator Awards (1994, 1997).

statement

If elected, I will push to deepen the engagement of ACM with the Asia computing community, building on the momentum initiated by the Council.

In addition to expanding ACM membership, we need to focus on the quality of engagement, such as bringing leading ACM conferences to the region, establishing a regional version when needed, and ensuring an active and sustained participation by the local community. The ACM Programming Contest has had a great mindshare among aspiring students at Chinese universities, with a broad participation and success of these schools at the event. Can we learn from these, and expand to other activities?

As computing becomes increasingly central in addressing societal problems in energy, environment, and health that affect the region and the rest of the world, and as these problems increasingly demand more global, coordinated actions, ACM can be the thought leader in advocating a global, collaborative approach to addressing these problems.

Young students do look to role models when deciding what to study and making career choices. Microsoft has been sponsoring the Best Doctoral Dissertation Awards at the Chinese Computer Federation Annual Meeting. ACM can and should play a major role in similar activities, partnering with CCF and other organizations in the region.

Bringing leading lights in computing to Asia for public lectures has proven very successful in increasing public awareness of computing and inspiring young students. An example is the annual 21st Century Computing and TechVista Symposia organized by Microsoft Research together with universities across Asia. But it is equally important for the global community to hear the perspectives of leading researchers from Asia. ACM can help promote these researchers in the global community.

Biography

Eric Allman graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor’s Degree in 1977 and a Master’s Degree in 1980. While at Berkeley he was Lead Programmer on the INGRES relational database management system as well as making significant contributions to the Berkeley Software Distribution, notably sendmail and syslog. Sendmail remains among the top MTAs on the Internet, and syslog is the standard logging mechanism used in nearly all open systems and peripherals.

After leaving Berkeley, Allman worked at Britton Lee (later Sharebase) on database interface software and the International Computer Science Institute on the Ring Array Processor project for neural-net-based speech recognition. He returned to U. C. Berkeley at the Mammoth project, building department-wide research infrastructure for the Computer Science Division. He then founded Sendmail, Inc., an email infrastructure company based on his work at Berkeley. He has played many roles at Sendmail and currently holds the title of Chief Scientist.

Allman has been a member of ACM since 1975, is a past board member and officer of USENIX Association, was on the board of Sendmail for several years, and is currently a Trustee of Cal Performances, a U.C. Berkeley-based arts organization. He has written for TODS, TOCS, USENIX, UNIX Review magazine, and ACM Queue magazine, among others. He also co-authored the C Advisor column for UNIX Review for several years.

Allman is a Distinguished Engineer at ACM and is a founding member of the Queue editorial review board, on which he continues to serve.

statement

I have had the opportunity to watch ACM evolve over the last 40 years, starting from my introduction to computers in high school. I was given old copies of Communications, which I devoured, joining ACM as an undergraduate. In the 1960s and into the 1970s, CACM was both academic and pragmatic; for example, Communications had a Programming Techniques section as well as an Algorithms section that included descriptions of various algorithms (hundreds of them, including code!). As time went on ACM increasingly focused on academics and researchers to the detriment of practitioners such as myself, until 10 years ago when Queue magazine was started with practitioners as the express audience. I am proud of having been a founding member of the Queue board, and feel that I’ve been honored to help restore ACM’s relevance to people such as myself.

One of the challenges is explaining to practitioners how the ACM is relevant to them. Much of this is just a matter of awareness. ACM already has Queue, Tech Packs, the Learning Center, Safari books and videos, to name just a few. While these resources are of immense relevance to practitioners, most of them are relatively unknown in that community.

Another area of importance is international participation. The once English-centric computing world has now expanded into many geographies and languages. ACM needs to broaden its international outreach or risk becoming margin-alized. There is a huge amount to be done here, and it will be challenging, but it must proceed.

I have very much enjoyed working on the Queue board and with the Practitioner Board and with your vote, look forward to additional participation on the ACM Council.