J Strother Moore
Computer Science – Department Chair
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX, USA

BIOGRAPHY

J Strother Moore is CS department chair at UT Austin.

He got his SB degree in math from MIT in 1970 and his PhD from Edinburgh in 1973. He is an AAAI Fellow, an ACM Fellow, a member of the NAE, and a recipient of the ACM Software System Award.

Since his PhD he has spent 17 years in industry and 17 years in academia, successively at Xerox PARC, SRI, UT Austin, Computational Logic, Inc. (which he co-founded), and UT Austin again, where he now holds the Admiral B.R. Inman Centennial Chair in Computing Theory. His primary research is in automatic theorem proving and the verification of hardware and software but his contributions are broader.

Moore loves programming. He put himself through MIT working for the MIT Laser Research Group (where he wrote FORTRAN to solve differential equations), for IBM (page fault simulation), and for TRW Systems Group (debugging Apollo lunar orbit insertion and navigation). During his last year at MIT, he worked full time at State Street Bank and Trust (coding mutual funds services in PL/1). Later, he and Bob Boyer invented a structure shared approach to resolution theorem proving, which helped usher in "logic programming,'' and also a structured shared representation of edited text which became the basic representation in the Bravo and Word editors. Moore specified the INTERLISP virtual machine. Boyer and Moore are the co-authors of a fast string searching algorithm, a linear-time majority vote algorithm, and (with Kaufmann) a series of theorem provers used in commercial hardware and software verification. Moore led the effort to produce the first verified software stack and designed, implemented, and verified the assembler, linker, and loader for it. He led the effort to verify the floating point division microcode for the AMD K5 and other commercial projects.

Moore has been department chair for 7 years. He is on the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association, is co-chair of the 2008 CRA Snowbird conference, and co-authored an influential CRA best practices paper on how universities should handle CS IP from industrially sponsored research ( www.cra.org/reports/ip/ ). Moore serves on the ACM Educational Policy Committee, is active in NCWIT, has co-chaired the Habermann Award committee for 3 years, and is on the advisory boards of the CS departments of Prairie View A&M, New Mexico State, and UT El Paso.

STATEMENT

Computing is the transformative science of our age. Its effects on the other sciences, engineering, medicine, and business are acknowledged. But it will similarly transform all aspects of our lives and cultures in the decades ahead. Computing is transformative in part due to deep scientific reasons.

The workforce and diversity issues we face are exacerbated by the misconception -- which we helped promulgate -- that computing is merely a technological enterprise as opposed to a deep scientific one as well.

Our machines and their capabilities are among the most exciting intellectual ventures in history.

I want to lead the ACM because I am passionate about the transformative nature of computing and think the ACM is the organization that can get this vision out globally. But we must target the right audiences and deliver a compelling message. The right audiences are national leaders, industrial leaders, and academic leaders (including K-12). The message is that the science of computing will transform everything they care about, whether it is a national economy, a business paradigm, or the meaning of excellence in a given discipline.

Other initiatives that are important to me include: the cultivation of top-notch volunteer ACM leadership in India and China, broadening participation in the CS community at all levels, the branding of ACM as the unbiased source of trusted reports on computing issues of global importance (e.g., the globalization report), and the opportunity to become the publisher of choice in computing.

Most of my professional life has been as a programmer and researcher. But my biography supports my dedication to teaching, my abiding concern for opening the CS workforce to all, and my interest in the healthy collaboration of academia and industry.

I have 7 years of executive experience as chair of a large, top ranked CS department, and ten years of experience as Chief Scientist of a company I co-founded. I have served 3 years on the Board of Directors of the CRA. That experience has taught me some of the keys to institutional leadership.

A critical skill is listening more than one talks. Another is seizing the opportunity to identify and articulate shared goals. A third is assembling a trusted team of advisors and being open to their advice. A fourth is delegation of authority in areas where the institution already performs appropriately. And a fifth is leadership focus and follow-through on shared goals -- even if it means foregoing potential new goals to achieve still-desired old ones.

I am realistic enough to understand that in two years it is not possible to accomplish all the initiatives above. But I can promise to bring the full force of my experience, skill, energy, and passion to the leadership of the ACM.