memBeRs at LaRGe (7/1/10 – 6/30/14)

vinton G. cerf
vice President and
chief internet evangelist
google
reston, va, usa

Biography

Vinton G. Cerf has served as VP and chief Internet evangelist for Google since October 2005. He is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies to support the development of advanced, Internet-based products and services from Google. In the Internet world, he is an active public face for Google. Cerf is the former senior VP of Technology Strategy for MCI and VP of MCI Digital Information Services. Recognized as one of the “Fathers of the Internet,” Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the Internet architecture. During his tenure from 1976–1982 with the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Cerf played a key role leading the development of Internet and Internet-related packet data and security technologies. In December 1997, President Clinton presented the U.S. National Medal of Technology to Cerf and his colleague, Robert E. Kahn, for founding and developing the Internet. Kahn and Cerf were named the recipients of the ACM A. M. Turing Award in 2004 for their work on the Internet protocols. In November 2005, President Bush awarded Cerf and Kahn the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the highest civilian award given by the U.S. to its citizens. In April 2008, Cerf and Kahn received the prestigious Japan Prize.

ACM also awarded Cerf’s work the ACM Software System Award and ACM SIGCOMM Award. Cerf served as chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from 2000– 2007 and was founding president of the Internet Society from 1992–1995, serving a term as chairman of the Board in 1999. Cerf holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from Stanford University and Master of Science and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from UCLA and is the recipient of over a dozen honorary degrees.

statement

I have been a member of ACM since 1967 served as a member of Council in the distant past during which time my primary policy objective was to create the Fellow grade of ACM membership. I also served for four years as chairman of ACM SIGCOMM.

As Member-at-Large, I consider that my primary function will be to convey to Council and ACM leadership the policy views of the general membership. To this end, I will invite open dialog with any and all members of ACM so as to be informed of their views. I offer to do my best to represent these views and also to exercise my best judgment in the setting of ACM policy and assisting the staff in their operational roles.

It seems clear that ACM can and must take increasing advantage of the online environment created by the Internet, World Wide Web, and other applications supported by this global networking infrastructure. This suggests to me that Council and ACM leadership should be looking for ways to assist Chapters and Special Interest Groups to serve as conduits for two-way flows of information, education, training, and expertise. The power and value of ACM membership flows from the contributions and actions of its members.

As a consumer of ACM publications, I am interested in increasing the accessibility and utility of ACM’s online offerings, including options for reducing the cost of access to content in this form. By the same token, I am interested in making the face-to-face events sponsored by ACM and its affiliates useful during and after the events have taken place. The possibility of audio, video, and text transcripts of presentations ( perhaps starting with keynotes) seems attractive. If these forms of content can be made searchable, their value may well increase and persist over longer periods of time.

30 communications of the acm | may2010 | vol. 53 | no. 5

satoshi matsuoKa Professor of mathematical and computing sciences tokyo institute of technology tokyo, Japan

Biography

Satoshi Matsuoka received his Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Tokyo. After being a Research Associate and Lecturer for the university’s Information Science and Information Engineering, departments, he became an Associate Professor in the Dept. of Mathematical and CS. Five years later, he became a professor at the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center (GSIC) of Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech)—ranked 2nd in Japan and 22nd in the world in engineering and IT, according to the Times rankings. Matsuoka leads GSIC’s Research Infrastructure Division overseeing Tokyo Tech’s responsibilities as a national supercomputing center.

He leads Tokyo Tech’s TSUBAME supercomputer effort, named the fastest supercomputer in Asia- Pacific in June 2006 for three consecutive Top500s. He also heads a lab of 25 researchers and graduate students for the university’s Dept. of Mathematical and CS. From 2003–2008 he served as a sub-leader of the Japanese National Research Grid Initiative project—a $100 million national project to create middleware and applications for next-generation Japanese Cyber-Science (Grid) infrastructure. He has published over 200 refereed publications, many in top-tier conferences and journals, and has won several awards including the prestigious JSPS Prize from the Japan Society for Promotion of Science in 2006 from Prince Akishinomiya. He has played key roles in a number of international conferences, including program chair of ACM OOPSLA 2002, and technical paper chair of IEEE/ACM Supercomputing 09, the latter drawing over 10,000 attendees worldwide.

He has also held various key positions in academic societies, including secretariat of ACM Japan Chapter. His research interests focus on software issues in peta/exaflop supercomputers and clouds.

statement

Computing is now playing unprec-
edentedly dominant roles in
advancement of our society, and in
solving some of the key challenges
that mankind faces today, such
as global warming and pandemic
outbreaks. However, another
recent poll showed that many
non-IT researchers considered IT
to be a diminishing research area,
to be rather stagnant in the next
20 years. I had been involved in
various large ACM conferences,
academic societies, as well as many
national projects especially in
supercomputing / e-Science where
multiple IT technologies needed
to be harnessed, as well as being
extremely interdisciplinary in its
relationship to other disciplines—
based on such experience, I pro-
pose to focus my initial role as an
at-large council member to be the
following: ( 1) to elevate the status
of ACM conferences to be acknowl-
edged amongst all academic dis-
ciplines as a top-rate publication,
and ( 2) to establish an improved
framework in tightening relation-
ship of ACM with sister informa-
tion societies and related academic
archival activities outside of the
United States, particularly in Asia
Pacific. The former will be a key to
enhance the prestige of IT research
in academia, and will be achieved
by setting and publicizing more
streamlined standards in the
conference review process. The
latter will be demonstrable in col-
laboration with Information Pro-
cessing Society of Japan (IPSJ) as
well as other Asian societies, along
with involving Japan’s National
Institute of Informatics that owns
one of the world’s largest pan-
discipline academic publication
databases. Hopefully such activi-
ties will foster better recognition of
our field as an indispensable and
ongoing research discipline during
the 21st century.