PITTSBURGH—Barbara Liskov, apioneer in programming languages and distributed systems, and Scott Klemmer, whosehuman-centered approach is changing the way online systems are designed, arerecipients of the fourth annual Katayanagi Prizes in Computer Science.

The prizes honor the best and the brightest in thefield of computer science and are presented annually by Carnegie Mellon Universityin cooperation with the Tokyo University ofTechnology(TUT). The prizes are endowed by Japanese entrepreneur and education advocateKoh Katayanagi, who founded TUT and several technical institutions in Japan.

Liskov, Institute Professor at the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology and head of the programming methodology group in MIT's Computer Scienceand Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, will receive the Katayanagi Prize forResearch Excellence. The award recognizes an established researcher with arecord of outstanding, sustained achievement. It includes a $10,000 honorarium.

Klemmer, associate professor of computerscience at Stanford University, where he co-directs the Human-Computer Interaction Group, will receive theKatayanagi Emerging Leadership Prize. This honors a researcher who demonstratesleadership promise in the field. It includes a $5,000 honorarium.

"Both the winners are internationally recognizedresearchers and they have made outstanding contributions to computer science,"said Michiko Kuroda, dean of the TUTSchool of Computer Science. "I am convinced that their awards enhance the value andauthority of the Katayanagi Prize, and these awards will give a significantstimulus to academic and professional activities in computer science andtechnology."

Klemmer will accept his award and present a publiclecture, "The Power of Examples," at 4 p.m., Oct. 13 in the Rashid Auditorium,located on the fourth floor of the Gates and Hillman centers. The talk willexamine how examples provide inspiration for designers and will explore theimplications of online media, which offer an unprecedented diversity and numberof examples. Klemmer's research group has developed tools for harvesting andsynthesizing examples and providing them to programmers and end users in such away as to empower both audiences to creatively design new user interfaces andsoftware programs.

Liskov will accept her award and present a publiclecture at 4 p.m., Nov. 10, also in the Rashid Auditorium.

"BarbaraLiskov has made many fundamental contributions to computer science, includingthe development of several important programming languages, new theories ofobject-oriented programming and important algorithms for managing distributedsystems," said Randal E. Bryant, dean of the Carnegie Mellon School of ComputerScience. In 2008, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) recognized thoseachievements by presenting her the A.M. Turing Award, widely considered computerscience's equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

Her work has made software more reliable and easierto maintain. Among her contributions is the Liskov Substitution Principle(LSP), which she formalized in 1994 with Jeannette Wing, now head of CarnegieMellon's Computer Science Department. Programmers routinely define newtypes of objects from existing ones, such as through class hierarchies inlanguages such as Java or C#.  LSP characterizes when it is safe tosubstitute an object of a subtype for an object of the parent type, thuspreventing strange behaviors when the program is run.

In addition to the Turing Award, Liskov was therecipient of the IEEE John von Neumann Medal in 2004. She is a Fellow ofthe ACM and the American Academy of Arts andSciencesand a member of the National Academy ofEngineering.She was the first U.S. woman to receive a Ph.D. from a computer science department,which she earned at Stanford in 1968.

Klemmer joined the Stanford faculty in 2004, afterearning his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of California,Berkeley. "Scott Klemmer is considered to be one of the rising stars inhuman-computer interaction," Bryant said. "He is best known for his work investigatinghow software tools can increase the quality of people's creative work —especially the quality of interface design and programming. 

"Klemmer's work brings together approaches fromcomputer science, design and psychology to increase creativity in populationsas diverse as novice webpage makers, interface designers, and expertprogrammers. Organizations around the world use his lab's open-source designtools and curricula," Bryant said.

In addition to the Katayanagi Prize, Klemmer is therecipient of such honors as the Sloan Fellowship, National Science FoundationCAREER Awardand Microsoft Research NewFaculty Fellowship.

For more information, visit the Katayanagi Prize website,http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~katayanagi/.