Hennessy, Lampson, Jacobs, and Cerf - Digital Transformers

February 28, 2009
Mountain View, CA
John L. Hennessy is President of Stanford University, where he joined the faculty in 1977. Formerly Director of the Computer System Laboratory and chair of the computer science department, he became Dean of the School of Engineering in 1996 and Provost in 1999. A pioneer in computer architecture, he drew together researchers in 1981 to focus on RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer), a technology that has revolutionized the computer industry. In 1984, he co-founded MIPS Computer Systems, now MIPS Technologies, which designs microprocessors. He is the coauthor of two internationally used textbooks on computer architecture design. A recipient of the 2000 John Von Neumann Medal, the 2000 ASEE R. Lamme Medal, the 2001 Eckert Mauchly Award, and the 2001 Seymour Cray Award, he is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1995.
Butler Lampson is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at MIT and was previously at the Computer Science Laboratory at Xerox PARC and at Digital's Systems Research Center. He has worked on computer architecture, local area networks, raster printers, page description languages, operating systems, remote procedure call, programming languages and their semantics, programming in the large, fault-tolerant computing, transaction processing, computer security, WYSIWIG editors, and tablet computers. He was one of the designers of the SDS 940 time-sharing system, the Alto personal distributed computing system, the Xerox 9700 laser printer, and the Microsoft Tablet pc software. His numerous honors include the ACM Soft-ware Systems Award, the ACM Turing Award, the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award and von Neumann Medal, and the National Academy of Engineering Draper Prize. A Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and of the National Academy of Sciences, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1993.
Irwin Mark Jacobs co-founded Qualcomm in 1985 and remains Chairman of the Board. As Chief Executive Officer until 2005, he led Qualcomm's innovation of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA). Previously, he was Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairman of Linkabit Corporation. Formerly a faculty member at MIT and the University of California, San Diego, he coauthored a basic textbook on digital communications, Principles of Communication Engineering. A past member of the California Council on Science and Technology and past chairman of the University of California President's Engineering Advisory Council, he is Chair of the Salk Institute's Board of Trustees and Chair of the National Academy of Engineering. His many awards include the National Medal of Technology, the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, the Robert N. Noyce Award of the Semiconductor Industry Association, the Franklin Institute Bower Award in Business Leadership, and the IEEE/RSE Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2001.
Vinton Cerf formerly as Senior Vice President at MCI and prior to that was Vice President of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives. At DARPA from 1976--1982, he played a key role leading the development of Internet data packet and security technologies. From 2000--2007 he served as Chairman of the Board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. One of the "Fathers of the Internet," he was the codesigner of TCP/IP protocols and the basic architecture of the Internet, for which work he received the National Medal of Technology and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Honored as well with the National Academy of Engineering Draper Award, the ACM Turing Award, the Silver Medal of the International Telecommunications Union, and the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, among others, he is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, AAAS, the International Engineering Consortium, the Computer History Museum, and the National Academy of Engineering. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1995.