|
|
IMMEDIATE
New York, March 10, 2004 -- Mark Scott Johnson, a leader in building community among ACM's Special Interest Groups, has been awarded the 2003 Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award. An active member of SIGPLAN (the Special Interest Group on Programming Languages) since 1971, Johnson has had an extended leadership role, from program and conference chairs for several conferences to the Executive Committee from 1983-91. He served as SIGPLAN vice chair from 1983-87 and as chair from 1987-89. Appointed to ACM's SIG Governing Board (SGB), which oversees all SIG programs, Johnson was credited with building a strong community among the large and small SIGs and with ACM Headquarters staff. As Policy Advisor to the SIG Board, he contributed significantly to its recent revisions of the ACM Constitution and Bylaws. He currently serves as one of the SGB's representatives to the ACM Council. Johnson, a veteran of Silicon Valley, has held research positions at Hewlett Packard Laboratories and Sun Microsystems, as well as several startups. At Sun, Johnson orchestrated the effort to unbundle FORTRAN, Pascal, and later C from the Solaris operating system and to ship them as revenue-generating products. He also led the Java/HotJava group as it was retargeted to the Internet, ending with its successful launch in 1995. A graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, with BS and MS degrees in mathematics and electrical engineering and computer science, Johnson earned a Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia in computer science. He began his career as an assistant professor of computer science at San Francisco State University. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and has five previous ACM Recognition of Service awards. ACM will present the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award to Johnson at the annual ACM Awards Banquet on June 5, at the Plaza Hotel in New York. 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. |
