Barbara Simons

Barbara Simons was president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) from July 1998 until June 2000 and secretary of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents in 1999. She earned her doctorate in computer science from University of California, Berkeley in 1981; her dissertation solved a major open problem in scheduling theory. In 1980, she became a research staff member at IBM's San Jose Research Center (now Almaden). In 1992, she joined IBM's Applications Development Technology Institute as a senior programmer and subsequently served as senior technology adviser for IBM Global Services. Her main areas of research have been compiler optimization, algorithm analysis and design, and scheduling theory. Her work on clock synchronization won an IBM Research Division Award. She holds several patents and has written or co-written a book and numerous technical papers. Recently, Simons has been teaching technology policy at Stanford University.

Simons is a fellow of ACM and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received the Alumnus of the Year Award from the Berkeley computer science department, the Norbert Wiener Award from CPSR, the Outstanding Contribution Award from ACM and the Pioneer Award from EFF. She was selected by CLNet as one of its 26 Internet visionaries and by Open Computing as one of the top 100 women in computing. Science magazine featured her in a special edition on women in science.

Simons served on the President's Export Council's Subcommittee on Encryption and on the Information Technology Sector of the President's Council on the Year 2000 Conversion. She is on the board of directors of the U.C. Berkeley Engineering Fund, Public Knowledge, the Math/Science Network and the Electronic Privacy Information Center; the advisory boards of the Oxford Internet Institute and Zeroknowledge and PIR's .ORG Advisory Council. She has testified before both the U.S. and California legislatures and at government-sponsored hearings. She was runner-up in the first election for the North America seat on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board.