Frances Allen, one of the most successful women in the computing field, will speak on “High Performance Computers and Compilers: A Personal Perspective,” Wednesday, May 21 at 4:30 p.m. in F.W. Olin Center Auditorium. Her talk will be preceded by a reception in the Olin Atrium at 3:45 p.m.
Allen is an IBM Fellow Emerita at the T. J. Watson Research Laboratory in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and the first female recipient of the prestigious Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Turing Award.
She also played an instrumental role in the highly secret intelligence work of the precursor to the U.S. National Security Agency in its code-breaking activities during the Cold War.
Allen received a degree in education from Albany State Teacher’s College, now the University at Albany, in the early 1950s. She taught high school math for two years before earning a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan, where she was enticed by an IBM recruitment brochure titled “My Fair Ladies,” targeted to campus women technologists. She took a job as a programmer at IBM to pay off her college debt – and stayed.
Allen spent most of her 45-year career at IBM working on how to enable both programmer productivity and program performance in the development of computer applications. She is widely recognized for her work on the theory of program optimization and of leading PTRAN (Parallel Translations) project, as well as for making possible computing techniques that are central to business and technology today.
She was the first woman to be named an IBM fellow, the company’s highest technical honor, in 1989.
As the 2006 Turing Award recipient, Allen was recognized for “pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of optimizing compiler techniques that laid the foundation for modern optimizing compilers and automatic parallel execution.”
Widely considered the Nobel Prize in computing, the Turing is named for British mathematician Alan M. Turing, one of the fathers of modern computing.
Allen is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Engineers and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, ACM, IEEE and the Computer History Museum. She holds several honorary doctorate degrees and has served on numerous national technology boards.
Her Union talk is sponsored by the Computer Science Department.