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.
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.
Early life
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. 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.
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.
Over the course of her career at IBM, her interests shifted from research to the policy and regulation of technology.
<big>1993-2002: ACM</big>
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. 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. 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. The group's goals are to ensure that states and municipalities across America adopt voting technology best practices.
Other work
Simons helped found the Reentry Program for Women and Minorities at U.C. Berkeley in the Computer Science Department. She also co-chaired the ACM study of statewide databases of registered voters alongside Paula Hawthorn. Initially the League had seen electronic voting as better for disabled people, then endorsed voting machines that are "recountable" after Simons. With fellow computer scientist Douglas Jones, she co-authored a book about electronic voting machines in 2012, titled Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count?.
Awards and honors
- CPSR Norbert Wiener Award for Professional and Social Responsibility in Computing (1992)
- Featured by Science in a special edition on women in science (1992)
- ACM Fellow (1993)
- American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow (1993)
- Named by Open Computing as one of the top 100 women in computing
- Selected by CNET as one of 26 Internet "Visionaries" (1995)
- Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award (1998)
- U.C. Berkeley Computer Science Department Distinguished Alumnus Award in Computer Science and Engineering (2000)
- ACM Outstanding Contribution Award (2002)
- Computing Research Association Distinguished Service Award (2004)
- University of California, Berkeley College of Engineering Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award (2005)
- U.S. Election Assistance Commission Board of Advisors (2008)
- WITI@UC Anthea Award (2019)
- Award by Verified Voting Foundation, for her dedication to election integrity