Barbara Simons

Barbara Bluestein Simons (born January 26, 1941) is an American computer scientist and the former president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

She is a Ph.D. graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and spent her early career working as an IBM researcher.

She is the founder and former co-chair of USACM, the ACM U.S. Public Policy Council.

Her main areas of research are compiler optimization, scheduling theory and algorithm analysis and design.

She attended Wellesley College for a year, before moving to California in 1959 to resume her undergraduate education at Berkeley.

There, she married James Harris Simons.

At the beginning of her junior year she gave birth to a daughter, Liz, and dropped out of Berkeley shortly thereafter to become a mother and a housewife.

In this time she decided to pursue a profession in Computer Programming, and began taking computer science classes part-time, before enrolling in graduate school at Stony Brook University.

After a year of graduate school there, James Harris Simons and she divorced in 1974.

Simons transferred back to Berkeley for the remainder of graduate school, where she concentrated on studying scheduling theory and helped co-found the Women in Computer Science and Engineering club (WiCSE).

In 1981, she received her Ph.D. in Computer Science.

She received a Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award from Berkeley's College of Engineering.

1981-1998: IBM

After leaving the Berkeley in 1981, Simons began her career at Research Division of IBM in their Research Division in San Jose.

There, she worked on compiler optimization, algorithm analysis, and clock synchronization, which she won an IBM Research Division Award for.

In 1992, she began working as a senior programmer in IBM's Applications Development Technology Institute and subsequently as a senior technology adviser for IBM Global Services.

Over the course of her career at IBM, her interests shifted from research to the policy and regulation of technology.

1993-2002: ACM

Prior to becoming the ACM president, Simons founded ACM's US Public Policy Committee (USACM) in 1993.

She co-chaired this committee along with the ACM Committee for Scientific Freedom and Human Rights for 9 years.

She took early retirement from IBM in 1998 after spending 17 years with the company.

After leaving IBM in 1998, Simons served as president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the largest computing society in the world, until 2000.

She joined ACM when her career focus shifted from computing research to the politics of technology legislation.

As president, she co-chaired the ACM study of statewide databases of voters in 1999 under President Clinton, called Voter Registration Databases 2000–2002.

In 1999 she was elected secretary of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents (CSSP) as ACM President.

In 2001 after her time as president, she received ACM's Outstanding Contribution Award.

She is still a Fellow of ACM and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Simons has worked for technology regulation since 2002, where she advocates for the end of electronic voting.

She subsequently serves as the chairperson of the Verified Voting Foundation and coauthored a book on the flaws of electronic voting entitled Broken Ballots, with Douglas W. Jones.

Simons was born in Boston, Massachusetts and grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio.

In high school, she developed an interest for math and science while taking A.P. Math classes.

In 2005 Simons became the first woman ever to receive the Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award from the U.C. Berkeley's College of Engineering.

She is a member of the board of directors at the U.C. Berkeley Engineering Fund, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and sits on the Advisory Boards of the Oxford Internet Institute.

Simons has also served as a professor at Stanford University.

After leaving IBM and serving as ACM president, Simons began working to reverse the dangers of using unverifiable technology in voting.

2008–Present: The Verified Voting Foundation

Since 2008, Simons has served on the board of directors of the Verified Voting Foundation, a non-partisan and non-profit organization that advocates for legislation to promote the safest and most transparent voting.

The group's goals are to ensure that states and municipalities across America adopt voting technology best practices.

Simons helped found the Reentry Program for Women and Minorities at U.C. Berkeley in the Computer Science Department.

She also serves on the boards of the Coalition to Diversify Computing (CDC) and the Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in Information Technology (BFOIT), both which promote minorities to learn and work in computing.