Biosketch
Butler Lampson is a retired Technical Fellow at Microsoft Corporation and an Adjunct Professor at MIT. He has worked on computer architecture, local area networks, raster printers, page description languages, operating systems, remote procedure call, programming languages and their semantics, programming in the large, fault-tolerant computing, transaction processing, computer security, WYSIWYG editors, and tablet computers. He was one of the designers of the SDS 940 time-sharing system, the Alto personal distributed computing system, the Xerox 9700 laser printer, two-phase commit protocols, the Autonet LAN, the SPKI system for network security, the Microsoft Tablet PC software, the Microsoft Palladium high-assurance stack, and several programming languages. He received the ACM Software Systems Award in 1984 for his work on the Alto, the IEEE Computer Pioneer award in 1996 and von Neumann Medal in 2001, the Turing Award in 1992, and the NAE?s Draper Prize in 2004. He is a member of the US National Academies of Sciences and of Engineering, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society.
Research Interests
I am working on writing specifications for programs, and on computer security and privacy, in particular on how to give people personal control of digital data about them. I am also trying to understand how to keep devices in the Internet of Things from killing people.
Membership Type
Member
Election Year
2005
Primary Section
Section 34: Computer and Information Sciences