Dr. David Michael Ungar

An American computer scientist, in 1986 he co-created the Self programming language with Randall Smith while working at Xerox PARC. He describes himself as, ??an out-of-the-box thinker who enjoys the challenge of building a computer software system that works like magic and fits a user's mind like a glove.? He has vast experience in the design and construction of virtual machines for object-oriented languages, the design of dynamic object-oriented languages, object-oriented programming, the design of programming environments, and prototype-based languages. The SELF development environment's animated user experience was described in the influential paper Animation: From Cartoons to the User Interface co-written with Bay-Wei Chang, which won a lasting impact award at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology 2004. He graduated from Albert Einstein Senior High School in 1972, and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1985. His doctoral advisor was David Patterson and his dissertation was entitled, ?The Design and Evaluation of a High-Performance Smalltalk System?; winning the 1986 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. He was an assistant Professor at Stanford University, Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Computer Systems Lab, where he taught programming languages and computer architecture, from 1985 to 1990. In 1991, he joined Sun Microsystems and became a Distinguished Engineer. In 2006 he was recognized as a Distinguished Engineer by the Association for Computing Machinery and in 2010 a Fellow. In 2007, he joined IBM Research in northern California, where he is currently a member of the Dynamic Optimization Group. In 2006 the October 1987 Self paper, ?Self: The Power of Simplicity?, which he co-authored with Randall B. Smith, was selected as one of the three most influential OOPSLA papers presented between 1986 and 1996. His 1984 paper, ?Generation Scavenging: A Non-disruptlve High Perfornm.nce Storage Reclamation Algorithm? won a Retrospective ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award in 2008. Other major publications, of which he is the author or co-author are: ?The History of Self?, with Randall B. Smith. ACM HOPL-III, 2007, Proc. of the Third ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages Conference (HOPL-III), B. Ryder, B, Hailpern (Eds.), San Diego, California, USA, 9?10 June 2007. Paper and video at; ?Reconciling Responsiveness with Performance in Pure Object-Oriented Languages?, with Urs H?lzle, TOPLAS 18, 4 (July 1996); ?Programming as an Experience: The Inspiration for Self?, with R. Smith, invited paper, ECOOP?95; and ?Animation: From Cartoons to the User Interface?, with Bay-Wei Chang, UIST 1993. He holds 20 U.S. patents, a few of which are: Perceptual-based color selection for text highlighting. (Jan. 11, 2005); Method and apparatus for increasing scavenging garbage collection effectiveness - (Jan 20, 2004); Method and apparatus for testing a process in a computer system - (Jul 15, 2003); Method and apparatus for finding bugs related to garbage collection in a virtual machine - (Dec 4, 2001); Method and apparatus of translating and executing native code in a virtual machine environment - (Aug 28, 2001); and Method and apparatus for supporting efficient programming in dynamic pointer-safe languages - (Aug 21, 2001). He was awarded the Dahl-Nygaard Prize in 2009.