Susan Owicki
Susan Owicki | |
|---|---|
| Alma mater | Cornell University |
| Occupation(s) | Computer scientist, licensed marriage and family therapist |
| Years active | 1970s–present |
| Known for | Interference freedom concept; founding member of Systers mailing list; ACM Fellow |
Susan Owicki is a prominent American computer scientist, recognized as an ACM Fellow and one of the original members who helped establish the Systers mailing list dedicated to women in computing. In the early 2000s, she shifted her professional focus to become a licensed marriage and family therapist.
Academic life
Owicki completed her doctoral studies in computer science at Cornell University in 1975, under the mentorship of David Gries. Her dissertation introduced the concept of Interference freedom, a critical approach for verifying the correctness of concurrent programs that share variables. This pioneering research culminated in two significant papers on axiomatic proof methods for parallel programming.
She spent ten years as a faculty member within the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments at Stanford University. Her academic investigations concentrated on distributed systems, performance evaluation, and secure systems tailored for electronic commerce, producing an extensive body of published work and patented innovations.
In 1994, Owicki was honored as an ACM Fellow, acknowledging her groundbreaking dissertation contributions to axiomatic proof techniques applied to parallel computing.
Industry career
Following her tenure at Stanford, Susan Owicki joined Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and subsequently took on the role of Associate Director at the Strategic Technologies and Architectural Research Laboratory (STAR lab). This laboratory was the first dedicated to advancing research in digital rights management and electronic commerce technologies. Additionally, she spent four years working independently as a consultant with expertise in interactive television performance and streaming video technologies.
Publications
Among Owicki’s key scholarly works are:
- Susan Owicki and David Gries (1976). "An Axiomatic Proof Technique for Parallel Programs I" (recipient of the 1977 ACM Programming Systems and Languages Paper Award)
- Forest Baskett, James H. Clark, John L. Hennessy, Susan Owicki, and Brian Reid. "Research in VLSI Systems Design and Architecture", Stanford University, 1981
- Susan S. Owicki and Leslie Lamport. "Proving Liveness Properties of Concurrent Programs", ACM TOPLAS, 4(3): 455-495
- Amy L. Lansky and Susan S. Owicki. "GEM: A Tool for Concurrency Specification and Verification," presented at the Second Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, 1983
- Thomas E. Anderson, Susan S. Owicki, James B. Saxe, and Charles P. Thacker (1993). "High-speed Switch Scheduling for Local-Area Networks", ACM TOCS, 11(4): 319-352
A full compilation of her publications is accessible online.
Patents
Among her patented inventions are:
- Template:US patent – A fault-tolerant distributed garbage collection mechanism designed for networked objects
- Template:US patent – Techniques and systems for embedding watermarks in software and various media formats
Additional professional roles
In addition to her computing career, Owicki practices as a licensed marriage and family therapist with a private practice and contributes to the faculty and staff assistance center at Stanford University.