About the award
The John Backus faculty award honors IBM Fellow John Backus (1924- 2007). He was the founder of FORTRAN, the first commercially viable high-level language, and of the functional programming language FP. John's work allowed programmers to use high-level languages with good performance that fostered the productivity in our current software industry. John was the recipient of the W.W. McDowell Award, the National Medal of Science, and the ACM Turing Award, among others.
This award will honor two mid-level career faculty members who, in the minds of the committee, have done the most to improve programmer productivity, whether through languages, optimizations, tools, methodology or any other techniques.
Learn more about John Backus:
Award amounts and expectations
In 2009, two John W. Backus awards will be presented to mid-career faculty from different geographies. Mid-career faculty can be either assistant or associate professors, as defined by their institution. The awards will be dependant on country and geography with a range from US $75,000 to $150,000 over three years. The faculty members will also be invited to spend two summer assignments in an IBM Research facility.
Submissions
Initial submissions must be from a department chair, with a maximum of two submissions allowed per institution. The submissions should consist of a two paragraph abstract with pointers to the nominee's personal Web page, resume or Digital Bibliography & Library Project entry. The committee will review and select the top ten for further submission of a complete entry by a chair of the department. This second submission should show the relevance to the theme of the award, which is programmer productivity. There are no limitations to the topics within this theme that can be proposed.
The submissions proposals will be judged by a committee consisting of academics and professionals both within and outside of IBM. Their decisions will be final. The committee members are: Alex Aiken, Frances Allen, Grady Booch, Fred Brooks, Yishai Feldman, Erich Gamma, Sue Graham, David Grove, Manish Gupta, Brent Hailpern, David Harel, Linda Northrop, and Mark Wegman (chair).
How to submit
The date to enter award nominations has passed; we are not accepting any more submissions.
Thank you for your interest in our award programs.
Key dates
All deadline times are 11:59 PM, U.S. Eastern Time.
- November 24, 2008: Online submission opens
- December 22, 2008: Deadline for initial proposal submission
- January 19, 2009: Finalists notified to begin final proposal submission
- February 28, 2009: Deadline for final proposal submission
- March 26, 2009: Award winners notified by e-mail and postal mail