Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Barbara Liskov won ACM’s 2008 A. M. Turing Award for lasting and major technical contributions to the computing community for her work in developing methods that ease the construction of large software systems. “The work that I did was to develop a way of putting complicated software systems into modules where each module presented to its users a relatively simple interface and then on the inside there could be a complicated implementation,” Liskov says in an interview. She also developed CLU, a programming language that was not used outside of academia, but whose underlying concepts migrated into mainstream languages such as C++, Java, and C sharp. Liskov identifies two components of writing good software–comprehending the fundamental techniques that one can use and cultivating craft that has a lot to do with favoring simplicity over complexity. Liskov says her current research focus is distributed computing. She predicts that more and more of data storage is going to be transferred from personal devices to storage delivered via Internet providers fairly soon. Liskov reasons that the Internet is basically insecure, and among her recommendations for preventing data breaches is encrypting the data whenever it is placed on any sort of removable media. She says that innovations in programming languages may be fueled by the programming challenges of multicore systems, and speculates that artificial intelligence techniques may one day yield a more accurate search engine. Liskov agrees that women face obstacles in the pursuit of computing careers, including societal and cultural prejudices.
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