memBeRs At LARGe (7/1/12 – 6/30/16)

RADIA PERLMAN intel fellow redmond, Wa, USa

RICARDO BAEZA-YATES VP of research for eMea & latam yahoo! research barcelona barcelona, catalunya, Spain

Biography Radia Perlman, Intel Fellow, is director of Network Technology at
Intel. She received her S.B. and S.M
in mathematics from MIT, and her
Ph.D., in 1988, in computer science
from MIT with thesis “Network
Layer Protocols with Byzantine
Robustness.”
While a student at MIT, she
created systems for making pro-
gramming concepts accessible to
children as young as 3 years old.
Her work is credited for starting
the field of “tangible computing,”
in which computer commands are
physical objects that are plugged
together to create programs.

At Digital, she designed layer 3 of DECnet. Her innovations include making link state protocols stable, manageable, and scalable. The routing protocol she designed ( ISIS) remains widely deployed today. She also created the Spanning Tree algorithm that has been the heart of Ethernet for decades. After Digital, she worked at Novell and at Sun, designing network and security protocols. Most recently, she designed the concept that became the TRILL standard, which allows Ethernet to use layer 3 techniques such as short-est paths, and multipathing, while remaining compatible with existing endnodes and switches. She has also made significant contributions to network security, including PKI trust models, assured delete, protocols resilient despite malicious insiders, and strong password protocols.

Perlman is the author of the textbook Interconnections, and coauthor of Network Security. She has served on many program committees, holds over 100 patents, and has taught at MIT, Harvard, and the University of Washington. She was awarded an honorary Ph.D. by KTH (Royal Institute of Sweden), lifetime achievement awards by SIGCOMM (2010) and USENIX (2006), and the Women of Vision award for Technical Innovation by the Anita Borg Institute.

statement

ACM has played a critical role in shaping the field of computing, and I think there are several areas in which it is well positioned to help the industry in new ways.

Academia and industry would benefit from more cross-fertilization. Industry can bring a fruitful selection of real-world problems, and academia can bring rigor. Most industry people would find a lot of the content at academic conferences incomprehensible and irrelevant. Academics do not have the time or funds to spend enough time at standards meetings to extract conceptual problems to study out of the sea of acronyms and marketing hype.

One idea that might help is to encourage papers at conferences that can organize the field, such as sorting through several overlapping systems to get to the heart of what is really intrinsically different, and the real trade-offs. Some academics would not think such a paper was “novel enough to be publishable,” and yet the academic rigor to do this sort of analysis can be very challenging, and influential to the field. It is entertaining to have a panel of people on various sides of controversies debate each other, but having a careful analysis by someone without bias is critical. With content like this, more industry people would attend the conference, and even hallway interaction will spark collaboration.

Another problem in our field is misperceptions that cause some groups to believe they would not be good at it, or that they would not enjoy it. To enrich the industry by bringing in people with diverse thinking styles, perhaps ACM could sponsor contests for young students with interests other than building computers, such as music, art, or social interaction, that will inspire them to realize they can make a difference in our field.

Biography

Ricardo Baeza- Yates is VP of Yahoo!

Research for Europe, Middle East, and Latin America, leading the labs at Barcelona, Spain and Santiago, Chile, since 2006, as well as supervising the lab in Haifa, Israel since 2008. He is also a part-time professor at the Dept. of Information and Communication Technologies of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, since 2005. Until 2005 he was a professor and director of the Center for Web Research at the Department of Computer Science of the Engineering School of the University of Chile.

He obtained a Ph. D. from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1989. Before he obtained two master’s ( M.Sc. CS and M.Eng. EE) and the electrical engineering degree from the University of Chile, Santiago.

He is co-author of the best-seller Modern Information Retrieval textbook, published in 1999 by Addison- Wesley with a second enlarged edition in 2011, as well as co-author of the 2nd edition of the Handbook of Algorithms and Data Structures, Addison- Wesley, 1991; and co-editor of Information Retrieval: Algorithms and Data Structures, Prentice-Hall, 1992, among more than 300 other publications.

He has received the Organization of American States award for young researchers in exact sciences (1993) and the CLEI Latin American distinction for contributions to CS in the region (2009). In 2003 he was the first computer scientist to be elected to the Chilean Academy of Sciences. During 2007 he was awarded the Graham Medal for innovation in computing, given by the University of Waterloo to distinguished ex-alumni. In 2009 he was named ACM Fellow and in 2011 IEEE Fellow.

statement

I became an ACM member back in 1984 when I was a student in Chile. My initial motivation was to be part of the largest CS community in a time when there was no Internet. This feeling of belonging has been constant until today. In 1998 I was invited to be part of the first South American steering committee for the regional ACM Programming Contest, a position that I held for eight years. In 2007 I was invited to become a member of the Publications Board for a three-year term and since 2010, I have been a member of the ACM Europe Council. Thus, I know reasonably well how the ACM works across several continents.

On the technical side, I have been a member of the ACM SIGIR community for many years. I am also a member of SIGACT, SIGKDD, SIGMOD, and SIG WEB. Therefore, I also feel that I know well my research peers. For that reason, although I have received several awards, being named ACM Fellow in 2009 was for me the highest possible recognition given by my peers. So, when I was asked to be a Member at Large candidate, I gladly accepted.

So, based on my ACM experience, as a Member-at-Large my main goal will be to extend the influence of ACM in emerging regions, involving developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. To achieve this goal we need to promote the ACM Distinguished Speakers Program in places that never had the opportunity of listening to senior members of our community, extend the ACM Programming Contest in countries that do not participate, start agreements with CS associations in the countries where they exist, and, more important, work on making it feasible to have free access to the ACM Digital Library for the ACM student members on these countries. All these actions are easier from Europe due to their cultural and geographical proximity.