VASEM Spring 2023
Newsletter

Dear friends,

I hope that everyone has been enjoying the early spring and finding time to get outside and enjoy the spring colors. While we have much to report about the activities of the Virginia Academy and its members, we also have some sad news.

On March 10, Dr. William Wulf, passed away. Bill was NAE president from 1996 to 2007, a founder of the Virginia Academy, and the husband of our colleague, Anita Jones, a member of the Virginia Academy Board and, like Bill, a member of National Academy of Engineering.

A pioneering computer architect, Bill participated in the founding of computer science as a distinct discipline. During his years as the president of the NAE, he revived the organization and was a powerful advocate for engineering in public policy as well as for diversity in engineering. All who knew Bill mourn his absence.

This newsletter contains a short appreciation of Bill. It also includes several articles about honors our members have attained for accomplishments over long careers. Drs. Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn received the $3 million VinFuture Grand Prize for being founders of the Internet. This international award is given by the Vinfuture Foundation, an independent, not–for-profit organization established to recognize transformational technological innovations.

In addition, Vint received the 2022 IEEE Medal of Honor for co-creating the Internet architecture and providing sustained leadership in its growth, while Bob received the James Madison Award from Princeton University. This award is given annually to an alumnus for compiling a distinguished career, advancing the cause of graduate education, and achieving a record of outstanding public service.

Dr. Barbara Boyan, the executive director of the Institute for Engineering and Medicine at VCU, was recognized as one of the world’s top women scientists. She is known for her work in cell biology, biomedical engineering, and internal medicine.

In other news, we are pleased to welcome two outstanding individuals to our ranks, thanks to their election to the NAE. Dr. Gregory Washington, president of George Mason University, was honored for advancing technology at the interface of electromagnetics and materials and dedicated leadership and service in engineering education. Dr. Linsey Marr, the Charles P. Lunsford Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech and a speaker at our 2017 summit on Emerging Infections and Preparedness, was cited for advancing fundamental knowledge of transport, removal, and mitigation of airborne pathogenic viruses. Her expertise was particularly sought after during the pandemic.

We are also proud of the support for possibly careers in public service we provide young scientist and engineers at the start of their careers. The Virginia Academy will be hosting its fourth cohort of Commonwealth of Virginia Engineering and Science (COVES) Graduate Policy fellows from May 22 through August 11, 2023. Twenty-two excellent applications were received for the 14 positions available. Seven universities are supporting fellows, and external funding is available from MITRE Corporation and Huntington Ingalls Industries to support fellows from Virginia State University and Norfolk State University.

We are also in the midst of planning for our 2023 Summit, Virginia Smart Communities, in Richmond on October 10, 2023.

This follows our last Summit, which was held in October at the National Academy of Sciences building in Washington, DC. The topic, Securing the Future of Cyberspace, allowed us to bring together numerous outstanding speakers from industry, academia, and government. The summit was particularly relevant in that Virginia has the largest cybersecurity workforce in the nation. It was organized on behalf of the Virginia Academy by the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative. A summit report will be released shortly.

As you can see, the Virginia Academy is flourishing. I hope that you find this newsletter informative and enjoyable. Please feel free to contact me if I can be of any assistance.

Sincerely,

James (Jim) H. Aylor
President,
Virginia Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine

Join the Virginia Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (VASEM) and the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation (VIPC) for the 2023 VASEM Annual Summit!

VASEM will be providing an inside look at VIPC’s Virginia Smart Community initiatives which have been recognized worldwide as being at the forefront of innovation leadership and community engagement.
This Summit will also feature a VIP reception at a very special Richmond location on October 9th and a full day of inspiring innovation and academy presentations, networking and technology engagement on October 10th.

VIP and Featured Speakers will be announced soon!

Space is limited. Register Today!

It was not simply a pioneering computer scientist but a template for what an engaged, committed computer scientist can accomplish. A distinguished researcher and thoughtful teacher, he saw his election to the National Academy to the National Academy of Engineering not as the culmination of a career but as opportunity for principled public service. During his years as NAE president, Bill dedicated himself to elevating the profession and strengthening the organization’s capacity to benefit the nation. He was also a founder of the Virginia Academy, which he felt could play a similar role for the Commonwealth.

A Pioneering Researcher
Bill was there at the foundation of computer science as a distinct academic discipline, and throughout his life was one of its foremost proponents. In 1968, he was among the first to earn a doctorate in computer science and the very first from the University of Virginia. Upon graduation, he joined the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where his research spanned programming systems, computer security and computer architecture among other topics. Bill and his students designed Hydra, the software program used for C.mmp, an early multiple instruction, multiple data multiprocessor system with 16 CPUs. Hydra was written in BLISS, or Bill’s Language for Implementing System Software.

A Revered Teacher
In 1988, Bill and his wife, Anita Jones, joined the faculty at UVA, and Anita became chair of the recently formed department. During his UVA career, he led an NSF-funded effort to revise the undergraduate curriculum, which set the standard for computer science departments across the nation. He possessed an unusually broad view of the potential applications of computer science and cofounded UVA’s institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, certain that information technology would have a transformative effect on these fields.

A First-Generation Entrepreneur
In 1981, long before entrepreneur had become a buzzword, he and Anita left Carnegie Mellon to start Tartan Laboratories and soon attracted venture capital support to pursue his vision of a firm developing optimizing compilers for its clients. These programs translate high-level languages into machine language executable by a computer’s central processing unit (CPU). Bill and Anita eventually sold the profitable company to Texas Instruments in 1996.

A Dedicated Public Servant
Bill was also influential in creating a nationwide computer network to support research. During the late 1980s, he headed the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) for the National Science Foundation. CISE was responsible for computer science and engineering research as well as for operating the National Supercomputer Centers and NSFNET, which connected the supercomputer centers to regional research and education networks and, ultimately, to campus networks. Bill also played an important role in convincing Congress to allow public access to NSFNET, setting the stage for the modern Internet.

A Powerful Advocate for Engineering and Public Policy
In 1993, Bill was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, serving as its president from 1997 to 2007. While at the academy, Bill started programs to encourage students to enter engineering, established prizes for engineering achievement and encouraged the academy to issue hard-hitting reports that sometimes challenged government positions. In addition, he was a tireless advocate for policy and regulatory reform — in such areas as intellectual property protection, antitrust and export control — that would revitalize America’s ecology of innovation.

A Lasting Legacy
No matter what the challenge, Bill’s approach was even-handed, exacting, and far-sighted. He was widely respected and admired during his life for his generosity of spirit and high purpose, and he will be remembered and revered for these qualifies long into the future. A memorial service is being planned for later in the year. The family has asked that tributes be directed to the National Academy of Engineering or UVA Engineering to support activities that Bill care about deeply and worked to promote, including women in engineering, diversity in engineering, and engineering education.

The Internet is now such an integral, ubiquitous part of our lives that it is virtually impossible to appreciate the extent that it has transformed virtually every human endeavor. It is precisely because of the speed and magnitude of this change that the Vietnam-based VinFuture Foundation awarded its $3 million Grand Prize to five scientists and engineers whose work made this global network possible. Among them were two Virginia Academy members, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, Emmanuel Desurvire, and Sir David Payne were also recognized.

Founded by Vietnam’s first billionaire, Phạm Nhật Vượng, and his wife, Phạm Thu Hương, the VinFuture Foundation is an independent, not-for-profit organization established to promote meaningful change in the everyday lives of millions of people by honoring transformational technological innovations. Each year, it awards a VinFuture Grand Prize for breakthrough research and technological innovations that have improved the quality of human life and created a more equitable and sustainable world for future generations. It also presents annual prizes for female innovators, developing country innovators, and outstanding achievements in emerging fields. Awardees are selected by a Prize Council composed of individuals from academia, research, and industry who are globally renowned for their outstanding achievements in their fields.

Innovation Founded on Collaboration

Cert and Kahn were honored for developing interconnection protocols that specify how data should be broken into packets, addressed, transmitted, routed, and received at their destination, thus ensuring end-to-end communications on the Internet. They formulated the fundamental design principles of internetworking, specified the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) to meet these requirements, prototyped TCP/IP, and coordinated several early TCP/IP implementations.

Kahn became involved in this work during the 1970s, when, as part of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), he was responsible for system design of ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet. He organized the first public demonstration of the ARPANET, successfully connecting dozens of different computers. This was a watershed event that showed that packet switching technology was a reality.

In 1986, Kahn left his post as director of IPTO to found the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). In his recent work at CNRI, Dr. Kahn has been developing the concept of a digital object architecture as a basic approach to managing information in digital form. This notion is providing a framework for interoperability of heterogeneous information systems and is being used in many applications such as the Digital Object Identifier (DOI). He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Science.

Cerf conducted research at Stanford on packet network interconnection protocols and, in 1976, joined Kahn at IPTO. While there, he funded various groups to develop TCP/IP, packet radio (PRNET), packet satellite (SATNET) and packet security technologies. As Vice President of Digital Information Services at MCI Communications Corp., he engineered MCI Mail. In 1989, collaborating with Kahn at CNRI, he arranged for MCI Mail to become the first commercial email service to connect to the Internet. Like Kahn, Cerf is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Science. He is currently vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google and is former president of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Cerf used the awards ceremony to highlight the vital importance of collaboration, with Kahn and other colleagues, in launching the Internet. “The Internet story is 50 years old,” he said, “and it is one of grand collaboration. VinFuture teaches us that collaboration and cooperation bring hope and opportunity to the world.”

Research.com has ranked Virginia Academy member Barbara Boyan as one of 2022’s top female scientists in the world. Boyan is executive director of the Institute for Engineering and Medicine at VCU and the Alice T. and William H. Goodwin, Jr. Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Boyan was ranked 358^th nationally and 579^th globally for her work in cell biology, biomedical engineering and internal medicine, and she is committed to encouraging the next generation of scientist and engineers to follow in her footsteps. This determination is reflected in her leadership of VCU’s NSF-sponsored ADVANCE grant, which fosters the careers of diverse women in STEM, as well as of its NIH-sponsored BIRCWH grant, which encourages interdisciplinary research careers in women’s health.

“Appearing on this list reflects the high quality of her work,” said P. Srirama Rao, Ph.D., vice president for research and innovation at VCU. “It is really a proud moment for VCU to know that our women scientists are nationally prominent. It’s also inspirational to the next generation of female scientists that they can achieve excellence and prominence at VCU.”

IEEE has announced that it will present its IEEE Medal of Honor to Virginia Academy member Vint Cerf at its annual IEE VIC Summit and Honors Ceremony on May 5, 2023. Cerf is being recognized “for co-creating the Internet architecture and providing sustained leadership in its phenomenal growth in becoming society’s critical infrastructure.” The IEEE Medal of Honor, established in 2017, is the highest IEEE award and is given to an individual who has made an exceptional contribution in the IEEE fields of interest. IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organization, with over 427,000 members in more than 190 countries.

In 1974, while working as a program manager at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Information Processing Techniques Office, Cerf collaborated with fellow Virginia Academy member Robert Kahn. Together they designed the Internet Protocol (IP) and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) that make up the Internet’s core architecture and enable computers to connect and exchange data. IP is a set of rules for routing and addressing packets of data so that they can travel across networks and arrive at their correct destination. TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of data between applications running on hosts communicating via an IP network.

Having created fundamental procedures that ensure the Internet’s smooth functioning, Cerf shifted his focus to realizing its possibilities. In 1983, he led the development of MCI Mail, the first commercial email service on the Internet. And as vice president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, he worked alongside Kahn at the not-for-profit, developing digital libraries, gigabit-speed networks, and mobile software agents for computer networks.

Because of this history, Cerf was quick to appreciate the role that Google could have in the evolution of the Internet. In 2005, just seven years after the company was founded, Cerf joined it as Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, responsible for identifying new technologies and encouraging policies that support the development of advanced Internet-based products and services.

In the words of one of the industry figures who endorsed his selection for the Medal of Honor, “Cerf’s tireless commitment to the Internet’s evolution, improvement, and oversight and his evangelism throughout its history has made an indelible impact on the world.”

This year, Virginia Academy member Robert Kahn received the James Madison Medal from the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni. Named for Princeton’s first graduate alumnus, the Madison Medal was established in 1973. This honor is conferred each year on an alumnus or alumna of the Graduate School who has had a distinguished career, advanced the cause of graduate education, or achieved a record of outstanding public service.

Rodney D. Priestley, dean of the Graduate School, called Kahn (Princeton Grad, ’64) “a revolutionary thinker whose work has ushered in new ways of communicating, connecting us with a common language.” He cited Kahn’s work conceiving and developing the protocol for transmitting data between separate computer networks. “Dr. Kahn’s incredible contributions opened the door for an inconceivable proliferation of technological advances that continue to unfold today,” Priestley said.

Kahn was also responsible for the system design of the Advanced Research Project Agency network and developed the first packet switch network. At DARPA, he initiated the largest computer research program ever undertaken in the United States. He is currently chairman, CEO, and president of the not-for-profit Corporation for National Research Initiatives, which he founded in 1986 to foster information infrastructure research and development.

The more interconnected and extensive our computer networks become, the more vulnerable they are to cyberattack. As far back as the 1980s, there were high-profile attacks on networks maintained by AT&T and Los Alamos National Laboratory, but when the world went online in the 1990s, cybercriminals dramatically stepped up their activities. Since that time threats have only diversified and multiplied. Cybersecurity experts and cybercriminals are now engaged in what is likely to be a forever war.

To provide perspective on the challenges we face, the Virginia Academy teamed up with the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative to host Securing the Future of Cyberspace, our annual summit, at the National Academy of Sciences building in October. Our goal was to take a snapshot of the measures that cybersecurity experts from academe, industry, and government are proposing to secure the future of our networks.

We were honored that one of the founders of the Internet, Virginia Academy member Robert Kahn, agreed to deliver the keynote address, but are no less appreciate of the insights offered by Daniel Bono (CACI International), Kiersten Todt (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency), Thomas Dingus (Virginia Tech), Charles Clancy (MITRE), and Debra Jordan (Federal Communications Commission). Collectively, they presented a picture of steps that are being implemented, others that need to be implemented, and those that are planned for future iterations of our communications networks.

Equally important, the summit gave us an occasion to spotlight our student researchers, who through their poster presentations shone a light on the variety of specialties required to mount a vigorous, comprehensive cybersecurity defense. It was gratifying to see a new generation energized by the challenges of cybersecurity.

Virginia has the largest cybersecurity workforce in the country and hosts many of the most sophisticated cybersecurity missions in the federal government. Out hope was that this summit would in some way raise awareness of the vigilance and ingenuity required for effective cybersecurity in Virginia and across the nation.

• Mohammed Alrezq – Industrial and Systems Engineering PhD program, VT
• Shelita Augustus – Materials Science and Engineering PhD program, NSU
• Juli Dutta – Cybersecurity MS program, NSU
• Zhenyi Huang – Statistics PhD program, GM
• Kaushal Kafle – Computer Science PhD program, W&M
• Jasmine Lewis – Biological Psychology PhD program, VT
• Sarah Morton – Health Psychology PhD program, VCU
• Geovani Muñoz – Counseling Psychology PhD program, VCU
• Nishat Ara Nipa – Electrical Engineering PhD program, ODU
• Teri Ramey – Environmental Science MS program, CNU
• AJ Emmanuel Simon – Computer Science MS program, VSU
• John Stiles – Climate Science MS program, GM
• Thanh Nhan Duc Tran – Civil Engineering PhD program, UVA
• Soroush Zare – Mechanical Engineering PhD program, UVA