Barbara Liskov

Barbara Liskov
Liskov in 2010.
Born	Barbara Jane Huberman (1939-11-07) November 7, 1939 Los Angeles, California
Nationality	American
Fields	Computer science
Institutions	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley Stanford University
Thesis	A Program to Play Chess End Games (1968)
Doctoral advisor	John McCarthy[1]
Doctoral students	Atul Adya, Sameer Ajmani, Russel Atkinson, Valdis Berzins, Toby Bloom, Winnie Cheng, Sheng-Yang Chiu, James Cowling, Mark Day, Sanjay Ghemawat, Robert Gruber, Maurice Herlihy, Deborah Hwang, Deepak Kapur, Rivka Ladin, Mark Laventhal, Ben Leong, Umesh Maheshwari, J. Eliot Moss, Andrew C. Myers, Brian Oki, Miguel Oom Temudo de Castro, Dan Ports, Rodrigo Rodrigues, Justin Schaffert, David Andrew Schultz, Alan Snyder, Benjamin Vandiver, William Weihl, Evan
Known for	Venus (operating system) CLU and Argus Thor (object-orientated database) Liskov substitution principle
Notable awards	IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2004) A. M. Turing Award (2008)

Barbara Liskov (born November 7, 1939 as Barbara Jane Huberman) is an American computer scientist^[2] who is an institute professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ford Professor of Engineering in its School of Engineering's electrical engineering and computer science department.^[3] She was the first woman to be granted a doctorate in computer science in the United States^[4] and is a Turing award winner who developed the Liskov substitution principle.

Life and career

Liskov was born November 7, 1939 in Los Angeles, California,^[5] the eldest of Jane (née Dickhoff) and Moses Huberman's four children.^[6] She 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 Ph.D. from a computer science department when she was awarded her degree from Stanford University.^[7][8] The topic of her Ph.D. thesis was a computer program to play chess endgames.^[9]

Liskov has led many significant projects, including the Venus operating system, a small, low-cost and interactive timesharing system; the design and implementation of CLU; Argus, the first high-level language to support implementation of distributed programs and to demonstrate the technique of promise pipelining; and Thor, an object-oriented database system. With Jeannette Wing, she developed a particular definition of subtyping, commonly known as the Liskov substitution principle. She leads the Programming Methodology Group at MIT, with a current research focus in Byzantine fault tolerance and distributed computing.

Recognition and awards

Liskov is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In 2002, she was recognized as one of the top women faculty members at MIT, and among the top 50 faculty members in the sciences in the U.S.^[10]

In 2004, Barbara Liskov won the John von Neumann Medal for "fundamental contributions to programming languages, programming methodology, and distributed systems".^[11] On 19 November 2005, Barbara Liskov and Donald E. Knuth were awarded ETH Honorary Doctorates.^[12] Liskov and Knuth were also featured in the ETH Zurich Distinguished Colloquium Series.^[13]

Liskov received the 2008 Turing Award from the ACM, in March 2009,^[14] for her work in the design of programming languages and software methodology that led to the development of object-oriented programming.^[15] Specifically, Liskov developed two programming languages, CLU^[16] in the 1970s and Argus^[17] in the 1980s.^[15] The ACM cited her contributions to the practical and theoretical foundations of "programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing."^[18] In 2012 she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.^[19]

Barbara Liskov is the author of three books and over a hundred technical papers.

Personal life

In 1970, she married Nathan Liskov. Their son, Moses Liskov, was born in 1975.

See also

• Women in computing

References

External links

• Prof. Liskov's home page
• Programming Methodology Group
• Turing Award press release
• Tom Van Vleck, Barbara Liskov, A.M. Turing Award Winner
• National Public Radio "Science Friday" interview with Barbara Liskov, originally aired on 13 Mar 2009
• Celebrating Women of Distinction, Barbara Liskov, Turing Award interview by, Stephen Ibaraki
• "Barbara Liskov: An Interview Conducted by William Aspray, IEEE History Center, August 6, 1991". GHN: IEEE Global History Network. Retrieved 2013-11-29. 
• John V. Guttag, Barbara Liskov, The Electron and The Bit: EECS at MIT, 1902-2002, Chapter VII: "Pioneering Women in EECS", pp. 225–239, 2003, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
• Barbara Liskov named Institute Professor, MIT News, July 1, 2008
• Department News: Barbara Liskov named Institute Professor, EECS Newsletter, Fall 2008
• Natasha Plotkin, Barbara Liskov named Institute Professor, The Tech (MIT), 128,29, July 9, 2008
• Robert Weisman, Top prize in computing goes to MIT professor, The Boston Globe, March 10, 2009
• Erica Naone, Driven to Abstraction, MIT Technology Review, December 21, 2009
• Barbara Liskov at the Chess programming wiki