Barbara Simons

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Barbara Simons is a prominent computer scientist and past president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She has held various technical, administrative, and public policy positions with the ACM since the early 1990s [1]; she is founder and former Chair of USACM, the ACM U.S. Public Policy Committee. Her main areas of research are compiler optimization and scheduling theory.

After receiving her Ph.D. in 1981 in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, she joined the Research Division of IBM, from which she took early retirement in 1998. In 1992, Science featured her in a special edition on women in science. She co-founded U.C. Berkeley's Computer Science Department Reentry Program for Women and Minorities.

Simons is on several Boards of Directors, including the U.C. Berkeley Engineering Fund and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, as well as the Advisory Board of the Oxford Internet Institute and the Public Interest Registry’s .ORG Advisory Council. She has testified before both the U.S. and the California legislatures.

Since at least 2002 Simons has been a highly vocal critic of unauditable electronic voting and is generally credited as a key player in getting the League of Women Voters to change its stance on this issue. Initially the League had seen electronic voting mainly as a way to minimize invalidly cast ballots, but at their June 2004 convention she led a successful fight to get this policy reversed to one of giving priority to voting systems that are "recountable". [Dugger, p.13]

[edit] Awards and honors

CPSR Norbert Wiener Award for Professional and Social Responsibility in Computing (1992)
ACM Fellow (1993)
American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow (1993)
Named by Open Computing as one of the top 100 women in computing
Selected by CNET as one of 26 Internet "Visionaries" (1995)
Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award (1998)
U. C. Berkeley Computer Science Department Distinguished Alumnus Award in Computer Science and Engineering (2000)
ACM Outstanding Contribution Award (2002)
Computing Research Association Distinguished Service Award (2004)