Barbara Simons

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]; as of 2004 she is a Fellow of the ACM, an ACM "National Lecturer", and chair of USACM , the ACM U.S. Public Policy Committee. Her main areas of research are compiler optimization and scheduling.

After receiving her Ph.D. in 1981 in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, she joined the Research Division of IBM. 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.

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]

As of 2004, she remains a member of the Application Development Technology Institute in the IBM Software Solutions Division. In addition to her involvement with the ACM, she is also a Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Awards and Honors

• CPSR Norbert Wiener Award for Professional and Social Responsibility in Computing (1992)
• Named by Open Computing as one of the top 100 women in computing
• Selected by net as one of 26 Internet "Visionaries" (1995)
• Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award (1998)

Reference

• Ronnie Dugger, "How They Could Steal the Election This Time", The Nation, p.11-24 August 16/23, 2004