IEEE Awards Booklet - 2010 - 9

I E E E

M E D A L S

2010 IEEE
Simon Ramo Medal

2010 IEEE
John von Neumann Medal

Sponsored by Northrop Grumman Corporation

Sponsored by IBM Corporation

Barry Boehm

John Hopcroft
Jeffrey D. Ullman

For leadership in and innovative solutions to the
integration of systems engineering and software
engineering

For laying the foundations for the fields of automata
and language theory and many seminal contributions to
theoretical computer science

Barry Boehm's integration of systems engineering principles
with software development has helped enhance the quality,
cost-effectiveness and competitiveness of how software and
other complex systems are developed. Dr. Boehm showed that
engineering rigor could be applied to software development
and that software engineering was as important as hardware
engineering. His models for predicting and evaluating software
development projects and processes helped create software
engineering economics as its own discipline and enabled developers to improve software productivity and quality. During
a U.S. Air Force study in the 1970s, Dr. Boehm showed that
software was the most critical technology for future strategic,
tactical and air defense systems. As a result, the government
redirected its research and development program from
hardware to software issues. Among the modeling techniques
developed by Dr. Boehm is the "Constructive Cost Model"
(COCOMO) family, which became the standard for software
cost and schedule estimation. He also developed the "Spiral
Model," which is a lifecycle process model defining iterative
development cycles that incrementally mature a software
system through effective risk management. This model serves
as the basis for the current generation of flexible, incremental,
risk-driven models. Current extensions of his "win-win" and
"anchor-point" spiral enhancements were adopted by the
United States to guide the U.S. Army Future Combat Systems
Program. An IEEE Life Fellow, Dr. Boehm is the founding
Director Emeritus of the University of Southern California (USC)
Center for Systems and Software Engineering, Los Angeles;
director of research of the DoD-Stevens Institute of TechnologyUSC Systems Engineering Research Center; and the TRW
Professor of Software Engineering at the USC Viterbi School of
Engineering.

Through pioneering research and wide-reaching textbooks,
John Hopcroft and Jeffrey D. Ullman are known as two of the
most influential figures responsible for shaping the field of
computer science. These giants of computer science first met in
1964 when Dr. Ullman took Dr. Hopcroft's automata theory
course at Princeton University. Together, they wrote the book on
automata theory and formal languages that was used by universities around the world to educate the first generation of
computer scientists, Formal Languages and Their Relation to
Automata. It's successor, Automata Theory, Languages, and
Computation, is still in use today.
Dr. Hopcroft is considered one of only a handful of computer
scientists who created the discipline of theoretical computer
science, unifying automata theory and formal languages during
the late 1960s. He also determined that computer programming
could be synthesized into a theory of algorithms and that these
algorithms could be evaluated by their asymptotic complexity.
This led to a set of design principles that could be used to design
optimal algorithms. An IEEE Life Fellow, Dr. Hopcroft is also a
member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National
Academy of Engineering. He is currently the IBM Professor of
Engineering and Applied Mathematics at Cornell University,
Ithaca, N.Y.
Dr. Ullman also focused on compiler technology and code optimization, writing the definitive book on compiler technology
(Principles of Compiler Design, Addison-Wesley, 1977) with Aho.
In the late 1970s Dr. Ullman's interests turned to database
systems and he became known as one of the founders of
database theory. Dr. Ullman is a member of the National
Academy of Engineering and is currently the Stanford W.
Ascherman Professor of Computer Science (Emeritus) at Stanford
University, Calif., and currently heads Gradiance Corporation,
Stanford, which he founded to provide online homework and
programming-lab support for college students.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Awards Booklet - 2010