At its latest meeting, the IFIP General Assembly (GA) has named five new Fellows along with two Silver Core winners and five recipients of the IFIP Service Award.
IFIP Fellowships are conferred on a current or past member of an IFIP body (such as a Technical Committee, Working Group, IP3 or a Domain Committee etc) who has made an outstanding contribution to the field of information processing through their work as a technical leader, scientist, engineer or educator.
The 2023 Fellows are: Dines Bjørner, Chris Johnson, Irena Lasiecka, Jayadev Misra and Jaideep Vaidya.
The Silver Core Awards are presented to IFIP members who have made a significant contribution to the IFIP mission and goals. Congratulations to Regina Bernhaupt and Gloria Phillips-Wren!
IFIP Service Awards recognise individuals who have played an active role in an IFIP body or in organising an important IFIP event. We are delighted to acknowledge the latest Service Award winners: Graziano Pravadelli, Eija Helena Karsten, Barbara Rita Barricelli, Marta Kristín Lárusdóttir and Ciara Heavin.
Introducing Our Newest Fellows
Dines Bjørner is a Professor of Computing Science (Emeritus) in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Technical University of Denmark. He is a highly influential computer scientist in formal methods and software engineering, he has educated countless students across his career.
Bjørner promoted formal methods in the early days, in particular the VDM method with Cliff Jones. He founded the Danish Datamatics Center (DDC) research lab in Denmark. DDC and its spinoff DDC-I were behind the first European Ada compiler, which was developed with VDM. He founded, and was the first director of, the United Nations’ International Institute for Software Technology (UNI-IIST) in Macau. He was co-founder of the VDM-Europe conference, which later became the FM flagship conference. Since retiring, he has delivered 2-3 week PhD courses in numerous countries and is the creator of the new field of domain modelling.
A member of IFIP WG2.2 (since 1980) and WG2.3 (since 1979) he is also a past chair of IFIP WG8.9. He has the Danish representative in IFIP TC2 (1980) for five years and a member of the Program Committee for IFIP World Congress (1983) before Chairing the PC for IFIP World Congress in 1986, for which he received a Silver Core Award. He has attended and presented at numerous IFIP events and hosted several WG meetings in Denmark and Macau.
Chris Johnson is Faculty Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Queen’s University in Belfast, Ireland. A renowned scientist in the area of safety-critical systems, he has published more than 100 journal and conference papers.
He wrote the most cited book on accident and incident investigation: Failure in Safety-Critical Systems: A Handbook of Accident and Incident Reporting (2003). His reputation is also evidenced by his role as one of 15 expert witnesses to the Grenfell Tower Public Inquiry. Johnson has consulted to major national and international agencies including the UK Government, the European Commission, the European Railway Agency, the European Space Agency, EUROCONTROL and NASA.
Johnson co-founded the IFIP WG13.5 on Human Error Safety and System Development as well as the group’s working conference, which was extended to encompass security aspects in 2013. He has held numerous roles in WG13.5 including Chair, Vice-Chair and Secretary, and also served as Technical Program Chair of the INTERACT 1999 Conference in Edinburgh.
Irena Lasiecka is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Memphis, Tennessee, USA. She was recognised for her outstanding contribution to the development of mathematical foundations of control theory for distributed parameter systems with applications to engineering and life sciences.
She developed the theory of control and stabilisation of partial differential equations (PDE) interactive systems with an interface, and has an outstanding academic record of publishing seminal research and supervising over 30 PhD students and 18 postdoctoral researchers.
Lasiecka was Chair of WG7.2 from 1989-2002, Vice Chair of TC7 from 1995-2000 and 2008-present and Chair of TC7 from 2001-2008, as well as serving as UD Representative for IFIP sine 1996. She has also played an active role in organising various IFIP conferences and events, including Chairing the TC7 Conference in Poland and WG7.2 Conference in Florida. She was awarded a Silver Core in 1989.
Jayadev Misra is a Schlumberger Centennial Chair Emeritus in Computer Science and a Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin (retired 2015).
His work on concurrent and distributed systems has been widely influential in academia and industry. The UNITY methodology (developed with Mani Chandy) was the “first major step in getting beyond traditional programming languages to describe concurrent algorithms” [Lamport, 1994]. Professor Misra and Mani Chandy (and, independently, Randy Bryant) pioneered the area of parallel discrete event simulation through the invention of the Chandy/Misra/Bryant algorithm.
Professor Misra is a member of IFIP WG2.3 and an emeritus member of IFIP 1.9/2.15. Jointly with Tony Hoare, he proposed the “Verified software” project, which led to the VSTTE series of workshops, and the creation of IFIP WG 1.9/2.15.
Jaideep Vaidya is a scientist and educator at Rutgers University, New Jersey USA who is being recognised for his pioneering contributions to the fields of privacy protection in data analytics, information sharing and access control management.
Dr Vaidya pioneered the development of technologies for privacy-protecting analytics, initiating new areas of study, and developing highly impactful solutions to real world problems such as
detection of financial crime and COVID-19 symptom tracking. He has also made seminal contributions to automatic policy configuration, management and data sharing. His work has
resulted in over 200 papers, 15 keynotes, and 13 best paper awards.
Dr Vaidya is Vice Chair of WG11.3 Data and Applications Security and Privacy (since 2019) and has Chaired or served on the Program Committees of numerous conferences for that group dating back to 2008.