2023 NAE Meeting

With a memorial to William Wulf

Anita Jones will be attending the next 2023 National Academy of Engineering’s annual meeting in Washington DC. Kathryn and I will travel there this weekend. Here is a photo of her winning the Philip Hauge Abelson award in 2012, the top honor of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. (The JFIF original there is sharper; see this for why.)

Unfortunately Anita’s dear husband—Bill Wulf—will not be there. He passed away recently, so she will be helping NAE celebrate his strong contributions to computer science.

We wrote a memorial to Bill last March. I have known both of them well for a long time.

NAE Meeting

Anita will be leading the third item on the 2023 NAE agenda:

• New Member Inductions and Awards Celebration

• Recipients of the Simon Ramo Founders Award and Arthur M. Bueche Award will be recognized, followed by an evening celebratory reception

• Celebration of Life: NAE President William A. “Bill” Wulf, NAE President 1996-2007

• Technical Forum—Engineering the Future for Sustainability: Measuring and Communicating Our Progress

Bill obtained his PhD at the University of Virginia and retired there, but rose through the ranks at CMU beginning in 1968. That is when I knew him first. Here is CMU’s memorial on Bill Wulf.

Some History with Anita

I have a long association with Anita—we were both graduate students at CMU at the same time. I left to my first job at Yale and she stayed on at CMU as her first job. We did work together on security in 1978, which became a book:

Foundations of Secure Computation, Academic Press by Richard DeMillo, Richard Lipton, Anita Jones and David Dobkin.

The book had little impact but was fun to write together.

I visited Anita when she was a second-in-command at the Department of Defense (DoD) at the Pentagon.

She served as the DoD Director of Defense Research and Engineering. As noted there, the director reports directly to the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense. That’s what I mean by a second-in-command. She managed the science and technology program, including the development of new technology. The DoD science and technology program delivers new, technology-based capability to the military. Often the DoD investment in a technology spans a decade because it is not sufficient to do the research; the technology has to be reduced to practice and then applied.

Her office was huge but was filled with bland office furniture. The size was very large, but the quality of the furniture was poor. Not that I am a great expert on quality of office furniture, but it was clearly not expensive. Ken, speaking as a neutral party, infers this conveyed that she was not trying to sell any party on any one proposed system but was actively concerned with the good function (“nuts and bolts”) of all of them.

Open Problems

I look forward to seeing Anita and to hearing her comments about Bill.