12 March 1998

Satyanarayanan Receives Simon Award for Teaching
Excellence in Computer Science

Carnegie Group Professor Mahadev Satyanarayanan has been awarded the 1998 Herbert A. Simon Award for Teaching Excellence in the School of Computer Science.

He is highly regarded for his contributions to educational programs in SCS. He has collected numerous best paper awards at meetings and his unique student/adviser relationships have resulted in excellent doctoral theses.

"'Satya' has been an excellent teacher of some of our most important systems courses and also produced an impressive group of Ph.D. graduates," said Jim Morris, head of the Computer Science Department. "He is a superbly organized thinker and speaker who is able to convey information about complicated things to virtually any audience."

A winner of the 1997 Allan Newell Medal for Research Excellence, Satyanarayanan has done pioneering research in the field of distributed file systems and is considered one of the founders of the field of mobile computing.

He is the chief developer of the Coda File System, which provides application-transparent support for disconnected and weakly connected operation. Coda is the inspiration for the IntelliMirror component of Microsoft~s forthcoming Windows NT 5.0 file system. More recently, he has been working on a complementary approach--application aware-adaption--in Odyssey, a new platform for mobile computing.

Satyanarayanan holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and a master's degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras. He earned his doctor's degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon in 1983.

After earning his doctorate, Satyanarayanan became a researcher in Carnegie Mellon's Information Technology Center, which developed the university's Andrew computing environment in conjunction with IBM Corporporation in the early 1980s. There, he was a principal designer and implementor of the Andrew File System (AFS), a distributed system that enables a large user community to share data easily on a high speed network. Later versions of AFS were commercialized and incorporated into the Open Software Foundation~s Distributed Computing Environment.

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