Barbara Simons

Barbara Simons (born 1941) is a computer scientist and past president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is founder and former Chair of USACM, the ACM U.S. Public Policy Committee. Her main areas of research are compiler optimization and scheduling theory. Together with Douglas W. Jones, Simons co-authored a book on electronic voting entitled Broken Ballots.

Life and career

After receiving her Ph.D. in 1981 in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, she joined the Research Division of IBM, from which she took early retirement in 1998. In 1992, Science featured her in a special edition on women in science. In 2005 Simons became the first woman to receive the Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award from the College of Engineering of U.C. Berkeley.

She served on the President’s Export Council’s Subcommittee on Encryption and on the Information Technology-Sector of the President's Council on the Year 2000 Conversion. She is on the Board of Directors of VerifiedVoting.org. She has also been on the boards of the U.C. Berkeley Engineering Fund, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Public Knowledge, and the Oxford Internet Institute, as well as the Advisory Council of the Public Interest Registry’s ORG. She has testified before both the U.S. and state legislatures and at government sponsored hearings. She was runner-up in the first (and only) election for the North America seat on the ICANN Board.