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Report from |
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The |
1999 SIGAda AWARD WINNERS
Outstanding Ada Community Contributions |
SIGAda Distinguished Service Awards |
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Ted Baker David Emery Dirk
Craeynest |
Norman Cohen SIGAda’s
ASIS Working Group, chaired by Currie Colket (MITRE, & SIGAda Vice Chair for
Meetings and Conferences) |
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Past Winners (1994-1998) |
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Christine
Anderson John Barnes Kenneth L.
Bowles Richard Conn Robert Dewar John Goodenough Audrey Hook Jean Ichbiah |
Magnus Kempe Bob Mathis Jim Moore Emmett
Paige, Jr. Richard
Riehle Edmond
Shonberg Tucker Taft William
Whitaker |
Brad Balfour Benjamin
Brosgol Ed Colbert Chuck Engle Mike Feldman Gerry Fisher Anthony
Gargaro Mark
Gerhardt |
Hal Hart Mike Kamrad Charlene
Roberts-Hayden SIGAda’s
Numerics Working Group (Chaired by Gil Myers) |
It was our pleasure (along with my SIGAda Awards
Committee Co-Chair Ed Colbert) to honor Ted Baker, Dave Emery, Dirk Craeynest, Norm
Cohen, and SIGAda’s ASIS Working Group (Chaired by Currie Colket) at
SIGAda’99 in Redondo Beach in October as the sixth class of SIGAda Award
winners. This continues a SIGAda tradition — annual awards that are recognized
as the most prestigious in the Ada community. SIGAda has two categories of
competed awards: Outstanding Ada Community Contributions, recognizing broad, lasting
contributions to the overall state of Ada technology and usage, and ACM
SIGAda Distinguished Service Award, recognizing
exceptional “volunteer” contributions to SIGAda activities and products.
Each award winner has made multiple distinguished
contributions in the Ada community or SIGAda. In almost all 1999’s cases, their
contributions fit both award categories and it was fairly arbitrary which award
they received. Some of their highlight
accomplishments are summarized below, based on citations from their
nominations. (My apologies for flagrant omissions of important accomplishments.)
Ted Baker: No other individual has
done more to make Ada fit into real-time systems than Ted Baker. Ted has made several important technical
contributions to both the Ada language and to its implementations. The facilities in the Ada95 Real-Time
Systems Annex can be traced back to Ted's work. He was technical editor for the Ada Binding to the IEEE Real-Time
Extensions (IEEE P1003.5b), and also coordinated other Ada binding efforts
within POSIX. In support of his own
research on integrating Ada and POSIX Threads, he and his students at Florida
State University (where Ted is professor and chair of the CS department)
developed the “FSU Threads” library, which has had a significant impact on the
evolution of real-time Unix/POSIX systems.
Building on one of the first (C language) threads implementations to
claim conformance with the POSIX Real Time extensions, Ted and his students
went on to provide open source implementations of POSIX/Ada bindings and Ada
Runtime systems for the GNU Ada compiler.
Within SIGAda, Ted has been one of the organizers of the ARTEWG and the
Real-Time Ada workshops.
Because Ted Baker has advanced the state of the art
in Ada, facilitated the use of Ada on those complex real-time systems that were
the original justification for the Ada program, and probably impacted every
real-time system implemented in Ada today, Ted is a richly deserving recipient
of a 1999 SIGAda Award for Outstanding Ada Community Contributions!
Norman
Cohen: If quantity is quality, Norm Cohen has
written the best Ada books ever! If wit
is recognized as a great motivator for a cause, few people have done more for
Ada than Norm Cohen. :-)
Seriously, Norm exhibits those properties (and
really has authored one of the most popular Ada books, Ada as a 2nd Language),
but also he has continuously made high quality contributions to both Ada
technical activities too numerous to mention and to the organizing of SIGAda
activities such as serving as SIGAda Secretary, Program Committee Chair of
Tri-Ada'97, and a member of SIGAda's conferences' Program Committees many
times. Norm's winning style has brought
success to his Ada and SIGAda endeavors, and has motivated many others to
contribute also.
For broad, highly effective contributions to Ada and
SIGAda, it is my pleasure to finally recognize a treasured friend, Norman
Cohen, as recipient of a 1999 SIGAda Distinguished Service Award!
Dirk
Craeynest: Dirk is and has been for many years a driving force on both the
Ada-Europe and Ada-Belgium boards. He is also responsible for the Ada-Belgium
website and its annual conference, served as editor of Ada User Journal, and is
always involved in the annual Ada-Europe conference. In encouraging people to
promote Ada, and actively promoting Ada himself he plays a central role in the
development of the Ada community in Europe and especially Benelux (Belgium, The
Netherlands, Luxembourg).
In short, for his years of tireless “behind the
scenes” organizing of many Ada activities, his activism in getting U.S. Ada
personalities to appear at European Ada events and otherwise playing important
roles in keeping these two communities connected, I am very pleased to
personally recognize our delightful colleague Dirk Craeynest with a 1999 SIGAda
Award for Outstanding Ada Community Contributions!
David
Emery: Ada bindings have been the key to allowing
Ada to integrate with software written in other languages, and David Emery has
become known as “Mr. Bindings” for his work on a variety of binding projects
and technologies, most notably IEEE Std 1003.5-1992, the Ada Binding to
POSIX. Not only have the POSIX/Ada
bindings been a critical part of many important large Ada software projects,
the standard itself (with its rationale) has been cited many times as “the
bindings Bible.” Dave also participated
in the WG9 Ada 83 Uniformity Rapporteur Group, again emphasizing issues related
to interfacing Ada to other languages and the underlying system. He made several contributions to the Ada95
program, in the area of bindings and interfaces, and in the Information Systems
annex, leading an ATIP project that contributed both language concepts and
working prototype implementations of decimal arithmetic and formatted
output. Most recently, his technical
work has been in the area of software and systems architectures.
Dave has been very active in SIGAda since 1982,
serving as Secretary and later as Treasurer.
He has presented many papers and tutorials at Ada conferences in Europe
and North America, and his paper on Software Architecture (co-authored with R.
Hilliard and T. Rice) won “Best Paper” at Ada Europe '96. He has made several SIGAda Lectureship
presentations on Ada and Open Systems and Software Architectures. In addition, he was a member of the ACM task
force on local Special Interest Groups and is a member of the ACM Technical
Standards Committee. He also has
received awards from the IEEE for his work on POSIX and was honored as a member
of the Computer Society "Golden Core" of influential IEEE CS members.
David Emery’s body of accomplishments since the
early days of Ada constitute one of the strongest cases ever for both SIGAda
awards, so I excited to finally honor Dave for what I regard as long-overdue
recognition with a 1999 SIGAda Award for Outstanding Ada Community
Contributions!
Ada
Semantics Interface Standards (ASIS) Working Group: ASIS became an ISO standard
in 1998 through the efforts of the volunteers in this SIGAda working group.
ASIS began as an AJPO-sponsored activity in the late 1980’s, but was continued
and eventually made successful by ASISWG Chair Currie Colket and several other
dedicated, expert members of ASISWG for whom ASIS was more often a personal
technical passion than an employer-sponsored endeavor. In short, ASIS provides a basis for
implementing portable tools (capable of working with all compilers) to analyze static
properties in Ada source code, making broadly available for Ada improved
development processes for highly reliable and safety-critical systems that are
unparalleled for other languages. Code
comprehension, reliability, and quality are all directly enhanced by the
analysis of software engineering features of Ada enabled by ASIS. As testimony to ASIS’s success, it is now
supported by most Ada compiler vendors and is used in more than 20 nations
worldwide, including for analysis of most recent Boeing commercial and military
systems.
Following the Numerics Working Group which received
one of the first SIGAda awards for carrying important numerics packages through
to ISO standardization, it is exceedingly fitting that ASISWG, the second
SIGAda working group to accomplish carrying a product from inception to
international standardization, be awarded a 1999 SIGAda Distinguished Service
Award!
2000 SIGAda Awards Nominations Now Open: Many important contributors
to SIGAda and the state of Ada technology remain to be honored in the
future. There have been dozens of
“losing” nominations since we started the SIGAda Awards program in 1994, most
of whom deserve consideration again in the future. SIGAda intends to make at least one award in each category
annually. In case you want to nominate
someone, all you need to do is visit SIGAda's web page (http://www.acm.org/sigada/) and look under "Awards" or
send an email message to the SIGAda Awards Committee at SIGAda-Awards@ACM.ORG
or go the old-fashioned route
and use the paper form on the next page.
ACM/SIGAda Awards Program
Nomination Form
2000 SIGAda Awards Nominations,
for awards to be recognized at
SIGAda 2000 in November, are due 30 September 2000.
Name of Nominee:
Category of Nomination: (circle one)
(1) Outstanding Ada community accomplishments
(2) Distinguished Service as a SIGAda volunteer or leader
Address or Employer of
Nominee (if known):
Accomplishments Supporting
this Nomination: (attach separate
sheets if needed) Note: Please be thorough in your descriptions
because the Awards Committee will use these narratives as the primary basis for
selection.
Affiliation(s)
and position at time when primary accomplishments were achieved (if known):
Name
of SIGAda member submitting nomination:
Address/Phone/e-mail
of member submitting nomination:
Mail this form to: SIGAda Program Director, c/o ACM, 1515 Broadway-17th Floor, New York,
NY 10036
or email a message with the requested information
to: SIGAda-Awards@ACM.ORG
or submit via form on SIGAda Awards Web Page: http://www.acm.org/sigada/awards