28 June 1996

Carnegie Mellon's Wactlar Awarded an Endowed Chair, The Alumni Research Professorship of Computer Science

PITTSBURGH--Howard D. Wactlar, vice provost for research computing and associate dean of Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science (SCS), has been awarded a newly created, endowed chair--the Alumni Research Professorship of Computer Science.

As SCS vice provost, Wactlar oversees and coordinates computing activities within the Computer Science Department, Robotics Institute, Language Technology Institute, (which includes the Center for Machine Translation) and other intra- and interdepartmental research facilities. He has played a key role in many important computer science projects, and in developing Carnegie Mellon's computing and networking infrastructure.

"In his quiet and understated way, Howard has been a major contributor to the Computer Science Department and the school for nearly 30 years," said SCS Dean Raj Reddy. "He has touched the lives of everyone who has been through the computer science program at Carnegie Mellon."

"I have admired Howard Wactlar and his work since I first met him almost 30 years ago," said Carnegie Mellon President Robert Mehrabian. "He is an outstanding scholar who has demonstrated over the years his commitment to Carnegie Mellon. I am pleased that this recognition of Howard's many achievements has occurred during my tenure."

Wactlar is the principal architect and director of the Informedia project, a unique, on-line, interactive digital video library system that allows users to access, explore and retrieve video material from the archives of public television and educational institutions as quickly and easily as printed material. The system successfully underwent its first test outside the research lab this past spring at the Winchester Thurston School in Pittsburgh.

"Howard conceived Informedia as an integrating project that would leverage our systems and artificial intelligence research and present those areas with new, driving problems," said Computer Science Department Head James H. Morris. "It has been seized by both the department and the university as a way to lead us into new computing paradigms."

"Howard richly deserves this honor," Morris added. "In addition to Informedia, he has led or participated in many of the department's key research projects, including C.mmp, an early multiprocessing computer, and Mach, an expanded kernel for the Berkeley Unix Operating System."

Wactlar holds degrees in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Maryland. He joined the university staff in 1967, and over the years, his ability to leverage and integrate technologies advanced the university and his career.

In the early '80s, he developed a strategy for networking the campus that enabled its disparate computing environments to "talk to one another," thus paving the way for the Andrew communications network. He enabled the co-existence of multiple networks by putting computers between them as routers.

Wactlar was a founder of the Software Engineering Institute, where he served as director for technical and administrative services from 1984-88. He served as director of the Information Technology Center, an SCS research department focused on technology transfer, from 1992 to 1995. He has been a consultant to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the Federal Judicial Center, IBM Corp., the Los Alamos National Laboratory and other universities.

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