Sun Microsystems Inc. announced that two Sun Labs researchers have been recognized for outstanding innovation and achievement in their fields. Radia Perlman, Distinguished Engineer, is being acknowledged with an Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Award for her considerable intellectual contributions and impact on the field of networking technology. Ivan Sutherland, Sun Fellow and Vice President, received the 2005 Computer History Museum Fellows Award in honor of his lifelong-contributions to computer graphics and education.
“It is a great honor to have Radia’s and Ivan’s great work and lifelong achievements recognized by the industry,” said Glenn Edens, Senior Vice President and Director of Sun Labs. “Sun Labs takes great pride in our reputation for tackling difficult customer problems and solving these problems with significant technical advancements. These awards substantiate Sun’s dedication to keeping research, development and innovation as a top priority.”
The Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Awards
http://www.anitaborg.org/womenofvision/index.html recognize women contributing significantly to technology, through Innovation, Social Impact or Leadership. The Institute will honor Perlman with an award in Innovation this evening at the Women of Vision Awards dinner for her work in networking technology development, specializing in network and security protocols. Perlman is renowned for her invention of the Spanning Tree Algorithm, which is deployed in all of today’s Local Area Networks, and for her innovations that have made link state routing protocols robust, efficient, and scalable. She has also made major contributions to network security protocols and key management.
The Computer History Museum Fellows Award
http://www.computerhistory.org/events/fellows/fellows.shtml honors individuals for their contribution to the development of computing. Sutherland was recognized for his creativity and innovative work with Sketchpad, a groundbreaking interactive computer-aided design system, which became the subject of his PhD dissertation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sketchpad’s original interaction and functionality — including innovative hierarchical drawings, constraint-satisfaction methods and an interactive graphical user interface — continues to inspire admiration among computer graphics professionals today, more than forty years later. Sutherland joined Sun as a founding member of Sun Labs in 1990, after serving as chairman of computer science at California Institute of Technology and vice president of the consulting firm Sutherland, Sproull and Associates.
Several other Sun Labs researchers and research teams have also been honored with awards this year, including: Computerworld 1st Annual Horizon Awards: Proximity Communication team awarded one of Computerworld 1st Annual Horizon Awards, September 2005 — For a technology that “makes basic improvements in hardware or software architecture that enhance processing or communication for a wide variety of applications.” Best Paper Runner-Up at IEEE SCC 2005: For their conference paper, “A Service Management Facility for the Java Platform,” Glenn Skinner, Grzegorz Czajkowski, David Hearnden, Mick Jordan and Michael Wegiel won Best Paper Runner-Up Award at the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing, held July 12-15 in Orlando, Florida.
