Barbara Liskov is a computer scientist. She is currently the Ford
ProfessorA professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...
of
EngineeringEngineering is the discipline, art, skill and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, mathematical, economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design and build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes that safely realize improvements to the lives of...
in the
MIT School of EngineeringThe MIT School of Engineering is one of the five schools of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Generally considered having one of the best engineering programs in the world, the school has eight academic departments and one interdisciplinary...
's
Electrical EngineeringElectrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century after commercialization of the electric telegraph and electrical...
and
Computer ScienceComputer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
department and an
Institute ProfessorInstitute Professor is the highest title that can be awarded to a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States...
at the
Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
.
Life and career
She earned her
BAA Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
in mathematics at the
University of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
in 1961. In 1968
Stanford UniversityThe Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
made her
one of the first womenGlobal concerns about current and future roles of women in computing occupations gained more importance with the emerging information age. These concerns motivated public policy debates addressing gender equality as computer applications exerted increasing influence in society...
in the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
to be awarded a
Ph.D.A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
from a computer science department. The topic of her Ph.D. thesis was a computer program to play chess end games.
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;
ArgusArgus is a programming language created at MIT by Barbara Liskov between 1982 and 1988, in collaboration with Maurice Herlihy, Paul Johnson, Robert Scheifler, and William Weihl. It is an extension of the CLU language, and utilizes most of the same syntax and semantics...
, the first high-level language to support implementation of distributed programs and to demonstrate the technique of promise pipelining; and Thor, an object-oriented
databaseA database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...
system. With
Jeannette WingJeannette Marie Wing is a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, and assistant director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the NSF....
, she developed a particular definition of
subtypingIn programming language theory, subtyping or subtype polymorphism is a form of type polymorphism in which a subtype is a datatype that is related to another datatype by some notion of substitutability, meaning that program constructs, typically subroutines or functions, written to operate on...
, commonly known as the
Liskov substitution principleSubstitutability is a principle in object-oriented programming. It states that, in a computer program, if S is a subtype of T, then objects of type T may be replaced with objects of type S without altering any of the desirable properties of that program...
. She leads the Programming Methodology Group at MIT, with a current research focus in
Byzantine fault toleranceByzantine fault tolerance is a sub-field of fault tolerance research inspired by the Byzantine Generals' Problem, which is a generalized version of the Two Generals' Problem....
and
distributed computingDistributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal...
.
Liskov is a member of the
National Academy of EngineeringThe National Academy of Engineering is a government-created non-profit institution in the United States, that was founded in 1964 under the same congressional act that led to the founding of the National Academy of Sciences...
and a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and SciencesThe American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
and of the
Association for Computing MachineryThe Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
(ACM). In 2004 she won the John von Neumann Medal for "fundamental contributions to programming languages, programming methodology, and distributed systems". She is the author of three books and over a hundred technical papers.
Liskov received the 2008
Turing AwardThe Turing Award, in full The ACM A.M. Turing Award, is an annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the...
from the ACM for her work in the design of programming languages and software methodology that led to the development of
object-oriented programmingObject-oriented programming is a programming paradigm using "objects" – data structures consisting of data fields and methods together with their interactions – to design applications and computer programs. Programming techniques may include features such as data abstraction,...
. Specifically, Liskov developed two programming languages, CLU in the 1970s and
ArgusArgus is a programming language created at MIT by Barbara Liskov between 1982 and 1988, in collaboration with Maurice Herlihy, Paul Johnson, Robert Scheifler, and William Weihl. It is an extension of the CLU language, and utilizes most of the same syntax and semantics...
in the 1980s. The ACM cited her contributions to the practical and theoretical foundations of "programming language and system design, especially related to
data abstractionIn computer science, abstraction is the process by which data and programs are defined with a representation similar to its pictorial meaning as rooted in the more complex realm of human life and language with their higher need of summarization and categorization , while hiding away the...
,
fault toleranceIn engineering, fault-tolerant design is a design that enables a system to continue operation, possibly at a reduced level , rather than failing completely, when some part of the system fails...
, and
distributed computingDistributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal...
."
External links