MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

Professors Antoniadis, Brooks, and Lynch Receive Professorships

October 1, 1996

To: EECS Faculty and Staff
From: Paul Penfield, Jr.
Date: October 1, 1996
Subject: Dimitri Antoniadis, Rod Brooks, and Nancy Lynch Receive Professorships

Three of our colleagues are being honored by appointments to endowed professorships, effective today. Dimitri Antoniadis now holds the Stata chair, Rod Brooks the Fujitsu chair, and Nancy Lynch the NEC chair.

Dimitri Antoniadis is known for his work in semiconductor devices and fabrication, including computer modeling of physical fabrication processes, design and fabrication of novel devices, and computer aids for semiconductor manufacturing. For several years he served as Director of MTL.

The Ray and Maria Stata Professorship, formerly known as the Distinguished Professorship, was established in 1984. Now being renamed in honor of the donors, the chair reflects their interest in education and semiconductor electronics. The first Distinguished Professor was the late Richard B. Adler. Since his death in 1990, the chair has been held by Al Oppenheim, who has been appointed Ford Professor.

Rod Brooks, a world leader in artificial intelligence, generated healthy controversy in the field with his layered "subsumption architecture" for robot intelligence. According to this notion, each layer works independently without global coordination or reasoning. His artificial insects used this architecture to maneuver through rough terrain and over obstacles. Rod is currently Associate Director of the AI Laboratory.

The Fujitsu chair was established in 1988 to encourage superior performance by MIT faculty in our department. The original Fujitsu Professor was Bob Gallager, who is retiring this year.

Nancy Lynch is a world leader in the theory of distributed computing. She combines theoretical skills with knowledge of practical distributed systems. Her most recent book, "Distributed Algorithms," has just been published.

The NEC Professorship in Software Science and Engineering was established in 1982. The first and until now the only NEC Professor has been Barbara Liskov, who has just been appointed Ford Professor.