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News Release

Last modified: Thursday, December 8, 2011

World's largest computing society honors IU's Fox for high performance research, diversity efforts

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Dec. 8, 2011

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- The world's largest educational and scientific computing society, the Association for Computing Machinery, has recognized Indiana University Distinguished Professor Geoffrey Fox for his exceptional contributions to computing by naming him a 2011 Fellow.

Fox, a professor in the IU School of Informatics and Computing and in the College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Physics, was among 46 men and women from some of the world's leading universities, corporations and research labs named today, Dec. 8, to receive the distinction. Fox is also associate dean for graduate studies and research at the School of Informatics and Computing and serves as director of the Digital Science Center at IU's Pervasive Technology Institute.

"These women and men, who are some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in computer science and engineering, are changing how the world lives and works," said ACM President Alain Chesnais. "They have mastered the tools of computing and computer science to address the many significant challenges that confront populations across the globe. These international luminaries are responsible for solutions that are transforming our society for the better -- in health care, communications, cybersecurity, robotics, commerce, industry and entertainment."

The ACM Fellows Program, initiated in 1993, celebrates the exceptional contributions of the leading members in the computing field. These individuals have helped to enlighten researchers, developers, practitioners and end-users of information technology throughout the world. The new ACM Fellows join a distinguished list of colleagues to whom ACM and its members look for guidance and leadership in computing and information technology.

Fox was specifically recognized "for contributions to software applications for high-performance computing, and for diversity outreach," Chesnais added.

A full, tenured professor since 1979, when at Cal Tech, Fox came to IU Bloomington in 1997. This year, he was one of five IU professors promoted to the distinguished rank. He has supervised more than 60 Ph.D. theses, published nearly 1,000 papers and received tens of millions of dollars of grant funding. His work has been recognized internationally as being at the leading edge of Web 2.0 services such as social networking, distributed computing, parallel processing, data-intensive computing, and computational science and engineering.

Fox's pioneering use of Object Web technologies to build collaboration systems that are then applied to an integrated approach to synchronous and asynchronous distance education have benefited minority-serving institutions such as Jackson State University and the American Indian Tribal Colleges. His strong support for the Minority Serving Institutions' Cyberinfrastructure Empowerment Coalition is considered one of the best examples of how a single computer science professor can have an impact on numerous institutions with predominantly African-American, Hispanic and Native American enrollments.

A founding member of the National Science Foundation's Center for Research on Parallel Computation, Fox produced work on parallel computation that is recognized as the start of the revolution in scalable scientific computing and thus as having influenced the design and programming of virtually every high-end supercomputer in use today.

In 2009, Fox (B.A., '64, M.A., '68, Ph.D., '67, Cambridge University) was included by the popular computing publication HPCwire as one of the high performance computing "People to Watch in 2010." The annual list recognizes "the most influential, interesting and promising personalities having an impact on the world of high performance computing."

For more information, please contact Steve Chaplin, University Communications, at 812-856-1896 or stjchap@iu.edu. Tweeting IU science news: @IndianaScience.

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