Professor John Impagliazzo

Professor Emeritus John Impagliazzo has supported many educational computing activities over decades. The accomplishments include books, contributions to model computing curricula, efforts to encourage diversity in the field, and developing a history of computing. His professional services enhanced engineering and computer science education through accreditation, conference leadership, and mentoring of colleagues. His innovative book Computer Science: A Breadth-First Approach with C has contributed to new methods for introductory computer science and engineering education. Dr. Impagliazzo represented the IEEE Computer Society on the Computer Engineering Task Force where he served as a principal co-author and as editor of the IEEE/ACM Computer Engineering Curriculum Report (CE2004). In addition, he was an active participant on the task force that produced the ACM/IEEE Computing Curricula 2005 Report (CC2005). These documents have been very influential in the development of computer science and engineering programs around the world. Currently, he is the ACM lead on revising the CE2004 report. Impagliazzo serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the new magazine ACM Inroads and he was the editor-in-chief of the SIGCSE Bulletin (a publication of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education), positions he held continuously since 1997. He is an associate editor of the new five-volume Wiley Encyclopedia on ?Computer Science and Engineering?, published in 2009. Impagliazzo also championed diversity in computing education. In June of 2002, he developed a special issue of the SIGCSE Bulletin on ?Women and Computing?. Impagliazzo helped to generate over $60,000 in grants for this effort, which enabled the distribution of over 24,000 copies of the issue worldwide. Three years later, in cooperation with ACM, IEEE, and the IEEE Computer Society, he developed a special CD called ?Pathways: Women and Computing? that contained a compendium of articles that had appeared in the Communications of ACM, in ACM?s SIGCSE Bulletin, and the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. Impagliazzo chaired the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 9.7 on the History of Computing from 2001 to 2007. He edited or co-edited conference proceedings from various conferences on the history of computing and education resulting in five books. He recently publish two more books on the History of Nordic Computing 3 (HiNC3) and Perspectives on Soviet and Russian Computing. In all, Impagliazzo has helped publish seven books on computing history. The book on Soviet computing contains current writings of many of the computing pioneers from the Former Soviet Union. Its importance comes from the fact that these pioneers used to work under a shroud of secrecy and little communication existed between them. Impagliazzo generated almost $65,000 in grants to help support Soviet computing pioneers and academicians to attend a weeklong conference he organized on ?Soviet and Russian Computing? (SoRuCom) in Petrozavodsk, Russia, in 2006. Because of the event, many of these individuals were finally able to speak openly about the secret work they did in the past. For more than two decades, Impagliazzo has served the computing and engineering professions. He was an active participant in two-year college issues and chaired the ACM Two-Year College Committee from 1988 to 1991, where he helped raise over $100,000 in grants to develop and publish five curricular reports for associate-degree programs. For one of these, the ?Computing and Engineering Technology Report?, he was its principal author. From 1991 to 2003, Impagliazzo chaired the ACM Accreditation Committee. This committee recruited and selected hundreds of program evaluators for CSAC (formerly Computer Science Accreditation Commission) and later for the Computing Accreditation Commission of ABET. John is now an ABET program evaluator for computing and for engineering programs and was a CSAC program evaluator and team chair for almost twenty-five years. Additionally, he was an ABET/CSAC trainer for program evaluator candidates for three years. As an official evaluator for various accrediting agencies or as an expert consultant, Impagliazzo has evaluated over fifty-five computing programs worldwide. Impagliazzo chaired the 1996 ACM SIGCSE Symposium. Highlights of the event included the symbolic restarting of the ENIAC computer for its 50th anniversary and the chess match between world champion Garry Kasparov and IBM?s ?Deep Blue? computer. In 2010, he co-chaired the Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE) conference in Ankara, Turkey. Impagliazzo is a Life Fellow of IEEE and a Distinguished Educator of ACM. He was a member of the IEEE History Committee for six years, serving as treasurer, chairing its strategic planning subcommittee and its finance subcommittee. He participated in the IEEE ad hoc committee to review the IEEE History Center, its Virtual Museum, and to develop recommendations. He also developed a computing history website and helped in the support of NSF?s digital library initiatives.