CTO Kevin Fall Named Fellow of ACM
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December 10, 2015—Kevin Fall, SEI deputy director and chief technology officer, has been named a Fellow of ACM. ACM, the world’s largest computing society, recognized 42 new fellows for their significant contributions to the development and application of computing in areas from data management and spoken-language processing to robotics and cryptography.
The achievements of these professionals are fueling advances in computing that are driving the growth of the global digital economy.
“Whether they work in leading universities, corporations, or research laboratories, these newly minted ACM Fellows are responsible for the breakthroughs and industrial innovations that are transforming society at every level,” said ACM President Alexander L. Wolf in a press release.
Fall was recognized for contributions to delay-tolerant networking (DTN), which refers to networks that may lack continuous connectivity. Architectures for such networks must overcome problems related to long latency and disconnection. Understanding DTNs is critical to effective operation of mobile networks, ad-hoc military networks, near-earth satellite communications, and interplanetary networks.
As SEI CTO, Fall directs the research and development portfolio of the SEI’s technical programs in cybersecurity and software engineering. He is also an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science.
Before joining the SEI in 2013, he was a principal engineer at Qualcomm and Intel, where he worked on adaptive video streaming technology and networking-related programs. Fall was co-founder of NetBoost Corp., where he was responsible for architecture and design of a software framework for programming network processors.
Fall has also served as a consultant to the Defense Science Board and a member of the U.S. Air Force (USAF) Scientific Advisory Board, the Defense Science Study Group, the Army-Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Senior Advisory Group, the DARPA Information Sciences and Technology (ISAT) group, and Internet Architecture Board (IAB).
Fall holds nine U.S. patents and is a Fellow of IEEE. He is the co-author of the book TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1: The Protocols (Second Edition) and numerous technical articles.
Fall earned a B.A. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from the University of California, San Diego.
ACM will formally recognize the 2015 fellows at the annual awards banquet, to be held in San Francisco in June 2016.