C.V. Ramamoorthy earned his two undergraduate degrees in physics and textile technology from the University of Madras, India, two graduate degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley and a Master’s and Ph.D from Harvard University in Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics (Computer Science) in 1964. His education was supported by Honeywell Inc.’s Computer Division, Waltham, MA with whom he was associated til 1967, last as Senior Staff Scientist. He then joined the University of Texas, Austin as a Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. After serving as Chairman of the Computer Science Dept. for a short time, he joined the University of California, Berkeley as Professor of Electrical Engineering ad Computer Sciences in 1972, a position that he still holds. He has supervised 73 Ph .D students, who include Vice Chancellor, Deans, Dept. Chairmen, Chair Professors, the CEO’s including, most recently, the President of the IEEE Computer Society. He has held the Control Data Distinguished Professorship at the University of Minnesota and the grace Hopper Chair at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, Monterrey, California. He was also a Visiting Professor at the Northwestern University and Visiting Research Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
He is a Senior Research Fellow at the ICC Institute of the University of Texas, Austin. He has received the IEEE Computer Society’s Group Award in Education, the Taylor Booth Award for Education, the Richard Merwin Award for Outstanding Professional Contributions, the Golden Core Award, the IEEE Centennial Medal and the IEEE Third Millennium Medal. He is a Fellow of IEEE and of the Society of Design and Process Sciences, from which he received the R.T. YEH Distinguished Achievement Award in 1997. He also received a Best Paper Award from the IEEE Computer Society in 1987. Three international conferences were organized in his honor as well one UC Berkeley Graduate Student Research Award and two International Conference/Society Awards have been established in his name.
He served as the Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions of Software Engineering, and the founding Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions of Knowledge and Data Engineering. He is also founding Co-Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Systems Integration and of the Journal of the Society of Design and Process Sciences.
His research accomplishments include the pioneering work on extracting parallelism from sequentially executable programs (1967), optimal organization and parallel execution of arithmetic expressions (1968), optimal scheduling strategies for parallel processing (1969), and pipeline architectures (1971). In the area of distributed computing, he contributed to early work on recovery and roll-back techniques in computer programs (1971), automatic synthesis of logically correct network protocols and theories of system diagnostics (1982). Other research included theory and design of memory hierarchy (1965), automated simulation generation systems (1970), micro-diagnostics and micro-architecture techniques (1971). He was responsible for the development of the entire microcode for instruction sequencing and control of the first transistorized system of Honeywell, the H-290 in 1961. All of his research and accomplishments were made possible by an inspiring galaxy of collaborations and students, to whom he has been eternally grateful.
In the late 1960’s he and his students developed automated test generation and evaluation techniques (FACES SYSTEM) which were very successful in discovering programming errors in the U.S. Army’s Safeguard Missile Defense System as developed by Bell Labs. These were modified and reused to perform similar functions at NASA’s Space Shuttle Structural Test Facility at Huntsville, Alabama in 1971. Most recently, he has done research on functions, features and control in the service industries and he has shown the close and enduring relationships between software engineering and service engineering.
