IBM’s Fran Allen wins ‘Nobel Prize of computing’
Fran Allen, a retired IBM scientist who joined Big Blue at age 24 to pay off college debt but stayed around to become a software pioneer, has been named the first woman to win the top prize in computer science.
The Turing Award - considered the “Nobel Prize in computing” - goes to Allen for research that’s made it easier to write complex instructions for computers.
A resident of Croton-on-Hudson, the 74-year-old Allen worked for 45 years at IBM, mostly at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne and Yorktown, before retiring in 2002.
Allen’s genius was in optimizing the software, known as compilers, that translate programs from language a human can read and understand to language a computer can execute.
This work, which began in the 1960s, was so fundamental that it laid the groundwork for the way compilers are created today, said Ruzena Bajcsy, the chairwoman of the Turing Award Committee and a pioneering scientist in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence.
“It has had tremendous influence. It made programs run more efficiently, therefore you could run bigger programs and solve much bigger problems - like weather forecasting or searching for DNA matches,” Bajcsy said.
The Turing Award, which is presented by the Association for Computing Machinery, or ACM, with financial support from Intel Corp., comes with a prize of $100,000. Allen will receive the award in June at a banquet in San Diego.
The award is named after Alan M. Turing, a British mathematician who articulated many of the principles of modern computer science and artificial intelligence. He played a key role in code-breaking encrypted German communications in World War II. Allen, too, had a stint helping break Soviet codes when she was assigned to a National Security Agency project during the Cold War.
Past Turing Award winners include the inventors of technologies we use everyday, including Internet networking protocols and the programming language that led to the graphical user interfaces made popular by Macintosh and later Windows.
Although Allen was not chosen because of her gender, Bajcsy predicts she will be an inspiration to other women computer scientists.
“She is an example to the younger generation that if you are smart and work hard, you can get an award. It’s not a specialty for men,” Bajcsy said.
Allen’s award comes as women are taking on new roles in politics and academia. Harvard University just named its first woman president, and Nancy Pelosi recently became the first female Speaker of the House of Representatives.
“Maybe this is the time and period when society and in my case, my profession, is ready for a change,” said Allen, who is used to firsts. In 1989, Allen was the first woman to be named an IBM Fellow, the Armonk-based computer giant’s highest technical honor.
Allen said she plans to use the award to sound a call to young women to join the ranks of computer scientists. “The decline in the number of women entering computer science is a serious, national concern,” said Allen, who recently participated in an ACM task force on offshoring and blames the trend in part on a dearth of U.S. scientists.
Women Ph.D.s comprised 18 percent of graduates in 2004 and just 14.7 percent in 2005, according to the Computing Research Association.
“We’re not producing the graduate students in the United States who can fill those positions,” she said.
Making computer science more collaborative could lure more women, Allen said, noting that simple changes - like rearranging computing labs so that PCs face each other in a circle rather than the walls - could make a difference.
There were no computer science degrees when Allen started in the field.
She was finishing her master’s degree in math at the University of Michigan when she was recruited by IBM’s “My Fair Ladies” campaign to attract college women to its work force.
Allen intended to spend a few years at IBM, pay off her loans and become a math teacher, but the excitement of shaping the emerging field of computer science proved too alluring to resist.
The Fortran computer language had just been invented by an IBM researcher three months before Allen’s first day of work in July 1957.
Hired to teach IBM scientists Fortran, Allen was stymied by their reluctance to trust the language to convey their wishes to the machines. Improving the compiler software that translated the scientists’ instructions became Allen’s life’s work.
For many years, Allen partnered with fellow IBM researcher John Cocke, who died in 2002.
IBM researcher Michael G. Burke, who joined IBM in 1983 as a member of Allen’s team, said his boss and mentor has a gift for turning theoretical ideas into practical solutions, including those of Cocke.
“He was very brilliant, very creative. Fran would work with him on the theory, but she would work it out at the scientific level. She would formulate the ideas and communicate them to the community,” Burke said.
While today’s computer scientists take it for granted that programs are written in more natural languages like C, C++ and Java, early programmers had to write instructions in the 1s and 0s of machine code or something close.
“You had to be an ultra specialist to write a program the computer would run,” Burke said.
Work by Allen and others on compilers has made it possible to focus instead on the problem the program is supposed to solve.
“The big breakthrough was the language Fortran,” he said. “Anyone with at least a background in basic algebra could write a program in it. Then you needed the compiler, the software, that would take the Fortran and translate it into the machine instructions.”
Though Burke said he was attracted to IBM’s labs in large part because of Allen’s technical ability, he soon learned to admire her as a friend.
Well known around the lab for her sense of humor and gentle manner, Allen became famous among her colleagues for a phrase that gave a soft landing when she shot down an idea.
“If Fran didn’t like an idea, there was a question that you often heard, and you knew it was the question of death. It meant your idea was squashed. The question was, ‘Why would you want to do that?’ ” Burke recalled with an affectionate chuckle.
“As a leader, Fran was much more than just a technical expert and a technical visionary, she always managed with a big heart,” he said. “And she was probably the best manager I know of for promoting and developing the careers of the people working for her.”
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