A.M. Turing Award recipient and MIT Professor Barbara Liskov as a distinguished speaker at ETSIINF

Barbara Liskov (California, USA; November 7, 1939) earned her BA in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961. In 1968 she became one of the first women in the United States to be awarded a computer science PhD. Her thesis on chess end-games was supervised by Prof. Dr. John McCarthy.

 

After receiving her PhD from Stanford University, Barbara moved to the Boston area to work at the Mitre Corporation in Bedford, MA on computer design and operating systems. Using an Interdata 3 computer that had the ability to change the instruction set via microcode, she created the “Venus Computer” tailored to supporting the construction of complex software. The Venus operating system was a small timesharing system for the Venus machine used to experiment with how different architectures helped or hindered this process. The Venus system supported 16 teletypes and each user was connected to a virtual machine so that major errors would not compromise the entire system, only the virtual machine for that user.

 

In 1971, shortly after finishing her experiments with Venus, Barbara left Mitre and joined the MIT faculty as a professor in the Laboratory for Computer Science. Building on her experience at the Mitre Corporation, her research has focused on creating more reliable computer systems.

 

At MIT she led the design and implementation of the CLU programming language, which emphasized the notions of modular programming, data abstraction, and polymorphism. These concepts are a foundation of object-oriented programming used in modern computer languages such as Java and C#.

 

Her MIT group also created the Argus language, which extended the ideas of CLU to ease implementation of programs distributed over a network, including support for nested transactions. An example of such a distributed program might be a network based banking system. Argus provided object abstractions called “guardians” that encapsulate related procedures. As an experimental language, Argus influenced others developers.

 

Liskov's subsequent work has mainly been in the area of distributed systems, which use several computers connected by a network. Her research has covered many aspects of operating systems and computation, including important work on object-oriented database systems, garbage collection, caching, persistence, recovery, fault tolerance, security, decentralized information flow, modular upgrading of distributed systems, geographic routing, and practical Byzantine fault tolerance. Many of these, like Byzantine fault tolerance, deal with situations where a complex system fails in arbitrary ways. Liskov developed methods to allow correct operation even when some components are unreliable. With Jeannette Wing she developed a new notion of subtyping, known as the Liskov substitution principle. Her contributions have influenced advanced system developments and set a standard for clarity and usefulness.

 

Liskov is currently the Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT. She leads the Programming Methodology Group at MIT, with a current research focus in Byzantine fault tolerance and distributed computing. She became a full professor at MIT in 1980. She served as the Associate Head for Computer Science from 2001 to 2004, and in 2007 was appointed Associate Provost for Faculty Equity. In 2008, MIT named her an Institute Professor, the highest honor awarded to an MIT faculty member.

 

Honors and Awards:

 

Member, National Academy of Engineering (1989); Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1992); Fellow, ACM (1996); Society of Women Engineers Achievement Award (1996); IEEE John Von Neumann medal (2004); MIT Institute Professor (2008); ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Lifetime Achievement Award (2008); ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award (2008); ACM A. M. Turing Award (2009); CMU Katayanagi Prize for Research Excellence in Computer Science (2011); Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (2012)