Wesley H. Harris, head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, has been named to the Air Force Science and Technology Board of the National Academies. The board works closely with Air Force senior scientific and technical managers to develop specific study tasks requested by the Air Force, assists in the establishment of study committees to perform the studies, monitors the progress of studies underway and assures the quality standards of the Academies are met. Harris has served on several National Academy panels, including a recent committee examining the Department of Defense's National Aerospace Initiative. The study assesses the initiative's three pillars: access to space, hypersonics and space technology. The committee's report will be released in April.
Professor Stanford Anderson, head of the Department of Architecture, is the 2004 recipient of the Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA). The award honors a person who "has made outstanding contributions to architectural education for at least 10 years, whose teaching has influenced a broad range of students, and who has helped shape the minds of those who will shape our environment."
"Anderson has affected the very way that we think about thinking in architecture by shaping basic understandings about the importance and the roles of theory and history. He believes that architecture participates in--indeed, contributes to--the development of ideas that are continuous across cultures," said David Dixon, president of the Boston chapter of the AIA. Anderson was co-founder of his department's History, Theory and Criticism program, directing it until 1991 and again in 1995-96.
Michelle Liu, a graduate student in management, is one of 10 recipients of the Deloitte & Touche Doctoral Fellowships in Accounting for 2004. The program is funded through the Deloitte Foundation sponsored by Deloitte & Touche USA LLP. Awardees each receive $5,000 during the final year of course work and $20,000 during the subsequent year, when they are completing their dissertations.������������������
Butler W. Lampson, adjunct professor of computer science and electrical engineering, is one of four winners of this year's Charles Stark Draper Prize. Lampson, who is also a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft Corp., shares the $500,000 prize with Alan C. Kay, Robert W. Taylor and Charles P. Thacker. The four are recognized as inventors of the networked personal computer; at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), they led development of the Alto computer, which first operated in 1973.
The Draper Prize was established in 1988 at the request of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory to honor the memory of "Doc" Draper, the "father of inertial navigation," and to increase public understanding of the contributions of engineering and technology.
Fast Company magazine named Professor Sanjay Sarma as one of its "Fast 50." Readers nominated "ordinary people doing extraordinary things" ranging from heads of multinational corporations to garage inventors. Sarma was recognized in the Oct. 25, 2003 issue--his item was headlined "Raising The Bar (Code)"--for helping found the Auto-ID Center, a consortium of 100 companies and six universities that closed its doors in October after finishing its work: creating the EPC (Electronic Product Code), the next-generation bar-code system. The "smart tag," which uses RFID (radio frequency identification) technology, can be affixed to pallets, cases and individual items, providing information about whether an item was bought and also its path from factory to warehouse to supermarket shelves.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on March 3, 2004.
