A Fine Pair of Fellows ...

The ACM has just announced its list of 2007 ACM Fellows, and two names stand out for computing education in general, and for SIGCSE 2008, particularly the keynotes (see below).

Eric Roberts of Stanford University (photo left) has served the SIGCSE community for many years, spearheading such important (and gi-normous*) projects as Computing Curricula 2001 and the ACM Java Task Force (with my co-chair Susan Rodger). Eric received the 2003 SIGCSE Award in Reno, Nevada (where I recall his keynote did address diversity issues in computing education). Rumor has it that Eric taught a computing course for non-majors at Stanford that included Marissa Mayer, one of the SIGCSE 2008 keynotes -- clearly, Eric made the course more than accessible.

SIGCSE 2008 treasurer Scott Grissom told me about a game played at a past SIGCSE where each person names the most famous person who knows you by name -- Eric purportedly started with Bill Gates of Microsoft (yes, the "of Microsoft" part is unnecessary, but ...), but then added Condoleezza Rice of Stanford and "other stuff" -- when it was his turn to name a famous person who knows him, Scott wisely chose Eric Roberts.

The second new ACM Fellow connected (directly) to SIGCSE 2008 is none other than Randy Pausch of CMU (photo right). You can visit previous posts here or here or here to get Randy's background and his bittersweet, very emotional story. Randy will provide the opening keynote address at SIGCSE 2008; we are hoping this keynote is provided in person. Just to be complete, Randy has received the 2008 SIGCSE Award and the 2007 Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award as well.

On behalf of SIGCSE, well done to both Fellows.
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* so big a project I had to squeeze "gigantic" and "enormous" into one adjective :-)