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ACM HONORS PIONEER OF OBJECT TECHNOLOGY WITH NEWELL AWARD
Richard Gabriel Encourages Clear Communication of Ideas
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NEW YORK, March 15, 2005 -- ACM has recognized Richard Gabriel of Sun Microsystems for his role in shaping the growth and impact of object technology, and his influence in developing a software design community that cares about clear communication of ideas. A published poet and musician, Dr. Gabriel will receive the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award, which honors career contributions that have breadth within computer science, or that bridge computer science and other disciplines. The award, which is cosponsored by ACM and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), comes with a cash prize of $10,000.
Dr. Gabriel set the stage for many advanced object-oriented language features that were ahead of their time with his contributions to the definition of the Common Lisp Object System. He also influenced the development of Smalltalk and other infrastructure used by the object-oriented programming community. He authored a well-known paper, colloquially known as "Worse is Better," a meditation on programming language design, that has been widely debated by programming language designers.
Dr. Gabriel's efforts to move writing techniques from the arts, literature, and social sciences into computer science deeply influenced the communications of the design pattern community. He promoted writers' workshops as a means of capturing this form of design documentation, and has been working with the Computer History Museum on the preservation of classic software by harvesting these design patterns. As president of the Hillside Group, a nonprofit corporation dedicated to improving human communication about computers, he helped adapt the notion of patterns and pattern language to the domain of software engineering based on the work of architect Christopher Alexander.
Dr. Gabriel's lifelong interest in the origins of creativity led him to
conceive of and promote several self-creating and self-governing industry
and open-source communities. They include the Common Lisp design group; the
Jini technology community; and most recently, java.net, a web place where
communities join to build a city of diverse interests engaged in using the
Java language and technology in routine and innovative ways. He championed
and chaired the Onward! Track, a forum for the next big advance in object
technology, at the annual OOPSLA (Objected-Oriented Programming Systems,
Languages and Applications) Conference sponsored by ACM's Special Interest
Groups SIGPLAN and SIGSOFT. A man whose influence transcends programming
and software design, Dr. Gabriel organized writers' workshops for poetry and
software, and is leading the development of a prototype Master of Fine Arts
program in Software at the University of Illinois.
A 1981 graduate in computer science with a Ph.D. from Stanford University,
Dr. Gabriel earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Warren Wilson
College in 1998. He is a Distinguished Engineer with Sun Microsystems, a
Principal Investigator at Sun Laboratories, and president of the nonprofit
Hillside Group. He maintains a website for his writings and philosophy on
blending art and science at www.dreamsongs.org.
ACM will present the Allen Newell Award at the annual ACM Awards Banquet on June 11, in San Francisco, CA. The award was named for Allen Newell, a pioneer in artificial intelligence. This endowed award is supported by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and by individual contributions.
About ACM
ACM (www.acm.org) is widely recognized as the
premier organization for computing professionals, delivering a broad array
of resources that advance the computing and IT disciplines, enable
professional development, and promote policies and research that benefit
society. For further information, contact Virginia Gold 212-626-0505 or vgold@acm.org.
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