Written By: Audrey Woods
CSAIL Professor Barbara Liskov is widely known for her groundbreaking work on data abstraction, programming languages, and programming systems. She first discovered her interest in programming in the 1960’s. After earning her bachelor’s in mathematics from UC Berkeley, Professor Liskov took a job for a year as a programmer at the MITRE Corporation, and then spent a second year at Harvard working as a programmer on their language translation project. Returning to her home state of California, Professor Liskov attended Stanford to study computer science, doing research on Artificial Intelligence with John McCarthy. She was one of the first women in the United States to earn a PhD in computer science, writing her graduate thesis on a computer program that could play chess.
Returning to Boston to join MITRE again, she led projects such as the Venus Operating System, which supported multiple users and was designed to test concepts in machine architecture. In 1972, she joined the MIT faculty as a Professor in the Laboratory for Computer Science (which would merge with the AI lab in 2003 to become CSAIL). At MIT, she created CLU, the first programming language to support data abstraction. Later she created Argus, the first programming language to support the implementation of distributed programs. As leader of the Programming Methodology Group, her research interests included Byzantine-fault-tolerant storage systems, behavioral subtyping, decentralized information flow control, and concurrency-control techniques for fast databases running on multicore machines.
For her contributions to programming languages and system design, Professor Liskov won the Turing Award in 2008. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Inventors, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the Association for Computer Machinery. Previous MIT President Susan Hockfield said of Professor Liskov, “her pioneering research has made her one of the world's leading authorities on computer language and system design.”
