Scott E. Fahlman is a Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University who was one of the core developers of the common Lisp language and considered the inventor of the sideways smiley face.
David Wagner is an American computer professor and is a researcher in in cryptography and computer security. He is a member of the Election Assistance Commission's Technical Guidelines Development Committee, tasked with assisting the EAC in drafting the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines. He Discovered a flaw in the implementation of SSL in Netscape Navigator (with Ian Goldberg).
His other notable achievements include:
- He has published two books and over 90 peer-reviewed scientific papers. His notable achievements include:
- Served as Principal Investigator for the source code review and also the documentation review of the historic California state Top-to-Bottom review of electronic voting systems certified for use. Flaws found with vendor-supplied voting machines resulted in decertification and provisional recertification by the Secretary of State.
- Cryptanalysis of WEP, the security protocol used in 802.11 "WiFi" networks (with Nikita Borisov and Ian Goldberg)
- Cryptanalysis of the A5/1 stream cipher used in GSM cellphones (with Alex Biryukov and Adi Shamir)
- Cryptanalysis of Microsoft's PPTP tunnelling protocol (with Bruce Schneier and "Mudge")
- Invention of the slide attack, a new form of cryptanalysis (with Alex Biryukov); also the boomerang attack and mod n cryptanalysis (the latter with Bruce Schneier and John Kelsey)
- Development of Twofish block cipher, which was a finalist for NIST's Advanced Encryption Standard competition (with Bruce Schneier, John Kelsey, Doug Whiting, Chris Hall, and Niels Ferguson)
William Worthington (Bill) Pugh Jr. is an American computer scientist who invented the skip list and the Omega test for deciding Presburger arithmetic. He was the co-author of the static code analysis tool FindBugs, and was highly influential in the development of the current memory model of the Java language together with his PhD student Jeremy Manson.
Alfred Vaino Aho is a co-creator of AWK (the A in the name stands for Aho), and main author of famous Dragon book. He has a B.A.Sc in Engineering Physics from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science from Princeton University. He conducted research at Bell Labs from 1967 to 1991, and again from 1997 to 2002 as Vice President of the Computing Sciences Research Center.
After graduating from Princeton, Aho joined the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs where he devised efficient regular expression and string-pattern matching algorithms which he implemented in the first versions of the Unix tools egrep and fgrep. The fgrep algorithm has become known as the Aho-Corasick algorithm; several bibliographic search-systems utilize it, including the one developed by Margaret J. Corasick, and other string-searching applications.
Leonard Max Adleman is an American theoretical computer scientist who is one of the co-inventors of the RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) cryptosystem in 1977, and of DNA computing. RSA is in widespread use in security applications, including https. For his contribution to the invention of the RSA cryptosystem, Adleman, along with Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir, has been a recipient of the 1996 Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award and the 2002 ACM Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize of Computer Science.
Malcolm Douglas McIlroy is a mathematician, engineer, and programmer who was born on 1932. He created Unix commands: spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, tr. He had a good fortune to head the research department at Bell Labs in which Unix was born. While at Bell Labs he is known for working on:
- Languages and compilers: macros, Lisp, PL/I, TMG (a compiler-compiler), regular expressions; influenced Snobol, Altran, C++
- Documentation: making Unix manuals short and accurate
- Stream processing: Unix pipes, classic coroutine sieve, power series
- Storage allocation theory and practice; first conservative garbage collector
Adi Shamir is an an Israeli cryptographer who is the co-inventor of the RSA algorithm (along with Ron Rivest and Len Adleman), a co-inventor of the Feige–Fiat–Shamir identification scheme (along with Uriel Feige and Amos Fiat), one of the inventors of differential cryptanalysis and has made numerous contributions to the fields of cryptography and computer science.
In addition to RSA, Shamir's other numerous inventions and contributions to cryptography include the Shamir secret sharing scheme, the breaking of the Merkle-Hellman knapsack cryptosystem, visual cryptography, and the TWIRL and TWINKLE factoring devices. Together with Eli Biham, he discovered differential cryptanalysis, a general method for attacking block ciphers. (It later emerged that differential cryptanalysis was already known — and kept a secret — by both IBM and the NSA.)
Dan Boneh was born in Israel in 1969. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University in 1996 under the supervision of Richard J. Lipton. He is a known researcher in the fields of applied cryptography and computer security. His work includes cryptosystems with novel properties, web security, security for mobile devices, digital copyright protection, and cryptanalysis. He is the author of over a hundred publications in the field and a recipient of the Packard Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Award, and the RSA award in mathematics.
At age 19, Ed Fredkin left college (Caltech) to join the U.S. Air Force to become a fighter pilot. Fredkin’s computer career started in 1956 when the air force assigned him to MIT Lincoln Laboratory where we worked on the SAGE computer. He joined contract research firm Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN) in the early 1960s where he wrote a PDP-1 assembler (FRAP) and participated in early projects using the machine. He went on to become a major contributor in the field of artificial intelligence.
He returned to academia in 1968, starting at MIT as a full professor in electrical engineering where, from 1971 to 1974, he was director of the innovative research program in operating systems, timesharing, and artificial intelligence known as Project MAC.
Atty. Al. S. Vitangcol III is a practicing lawyer, a registered engineer, a contracts review expert, an academic scholar, an Information Technology (IT) specialist, and an automated elections specialist in the Philippines. A lawyer in the Philippines with a formal education in IT and a solid IT working experience behind him. He got some EC-Council certs which he thinks is enough for him to become a hacker. He was nominated to the 2007 Ramon Ozaeta Most Outstanding Lawyer Award, which is annually sponsored by the Philippine Bar Association (PBA).
He is a former law professor at the Lyceum of the Philippines - College of Law and a former lecturer at the Ateneo de Manila University – Graduate School of Business. He is a member of various local organizations and the Australian-based International Employment Relations Association (IERA).