Turing Award Winner Barbara Liskov (broadcast Friday, March 13th, 2009)

Barbara Liskov Photo MIT / Donna Coveney

MIT professor Barbara Liskov has won the 2008 Turing Award, what's been called the Nobel Prize of computing research. Professor Liskov heads the Programming Methodology Group in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The award, offered by the Association for Computing Machinery, is for "contributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing." Liskov was also the first woman to be awarded a Ph.D. from a Computer Science department. We'll talk with her.