An expert on electronic voting, Barbara Simons is on the Board of
Advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. She was a
member of the National Workshop on Internet Voting that was
convened at the request of President Clinton and produced a report
on Internet Voting in 2001. She also participated on the Security
Peer Review Group for the US Department of Defense’s Internet
voting project (SERVE) and co-authored the report that led to the
cancellation of SERVE because of security concerns. Simons
co-chaired the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) study of
statewide databases of registered voters. She recently co-authored
the League of Women Voters report on election auditing. Simons and
Doug Jones are co-authoring a book on voting machines.

Simons was President of ACM, the nation’s oldest and largest
educational and scientific society for computing professionals,
from July 1998 until June 2000. She founded ACM’s US Public Policy
Committee (USACM) in 1993 and served for many years as the Chair
or co-Chair of USACM.

In 2005, Simons became the first woman to receive the Distinguished
Engineering Alumni Award from the College of Engineering of U.C.
Berkeley. She is also a Fellow of ACM and the American Association
for the Advancement of Science. She received the Alumnus of the
Year Award from the Berkeley Computer Science Department, the
Distinguished Service Award from Computing Research Association,
the Making a Difference Award from ACM’s Special Interest Group on
Computing and Society, the Norbert Wiener Award from Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility, the Outstanding
Contribution Award from ACM, and the Pioneer Award from the
Electronic Frontier Foundation. She was selected by C|NET as one
of its 26 Internet “Visionaries” and by Open Computing as one of
the “Top 100 Women in Computing.” Science Magazine featured her in
a special edition on women in science.

Simons 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 election for the North America seat on
the ICANN Board.

Simons co-founded the Reentry Program for Women and Minorities in
the Computer Science Department at U.C. Berkeley. She is also on
the Boards of the Coalition to Diversify Computing (CDC) and the
Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in Information Technology
(BFOIT), groups that work at increasing participation in computer
science of women and underrepresented minorities.

Simons earned her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of
California, Berkeley. Her dissertation solved a major open problem
in scheduling theory. In 1980, she became a Research Staff Member
at IBM's San Jose Research Center (now Almaden). In 1992, she
joined IBM's Applications Development Technology Institute as a
Senior Programmer and subsequently served as Senior Technology
Advisor for IBM Global Services. Her main areas of research have
been compiler optimization, algorithm analysis and design, and
scheduling theory. Her work on clock synchronization won an IBM
Research Division Award. She holds several patents and has
authored or co-authored a book and numerous technical papers. She
is retired from IBM Research.

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