Barbara Liskov Named MIT Institute Professor

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On July 1, Barbara Liskov was named an Institute Professor – the highest faculty rank – at MIT. In 1972, Liskov became the first woman hired as a professor of computer science at MIT. She's also actively worked on improving the hiring process so that more women will be considered for faculty roles, and as an associate head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, she oversaw the hiring of five female faculty members.

According to the article in MIT's "The Tech" publication:

Liskov and the group she leads have made significant advances in the robustness of object-oriented programming languages. Her group produced the first language to support data abstraction and, more recently, developed the first practical protocol for securely replicating data on distributed systems and a language for application development on distributed systems.

A current project on Byzantine-fault tolerant systems may help sensitive data on future computers be more resilient to malicious attacks and software errors.

One researcher in her group developed X Windows, the windowing system used on Linux and Unix operating systems.