"I live in mortal fear that someday they'll catch on to the fact that they are paying me to have all this fun."

William Wulf
AT&T Professor of Computer Science and University Professor

Department of Computer Science
School of Engineering and Applied Science
University of Virginia
151 Engineer's Way, P.O. Box 400740
Charlottesville, Virginia 22904-4740

Phone: (434) 982-2223
Fax: (434) 982-2214
Email: wulf@cs.virginia.edu
Office: 238 D Olsson Hall, UVa

Home page of William Wulf

Areas of Interest

National science policy, architecture, security, and hardware-software codesign

Biographical Sketch

ill Wulf received the first Computer Science Ph.D. ever awarded at the University of Virginia in 1968. He then joined Carnegie-Mellon University as Assistant Professor of Computer Science, becoming Associate Professor in 1973 and Professor in 1975. In 1981 he left Carnegie-Mellon and founded Tartan Laboratories and served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer until 1988. In 1988-1990 he was Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation. In 1990 he returned to the University of Virginia as AT&T Professor and University Professor. Bill Wulf is a Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of ACM, a Fellow of the IEEE, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1997 he was elected President of the National Academy of Engineering, which operates under a congressional charter and presidential executive orders that call on it to provide advice to the government on issues of science and engineering. He has directed over 25 Ph.D. theses and is the author or co-author of three books, two patents and over 100 papers.

Research

ulf's research interests revolve around the hardware/software interface, and thus span programming systems and computer architecture. He designed Bliss, a systems-implementation language adopted by DEC, and was one of the architects of the DEC PDP-11, a highly successful minicomputer. He designed and constructed the C.mmp multiprocessor, and Hydra, one of the first operating systems to explore capability-based protection. He developed PQCC, a technology for the automatic construction of optimizing compilers, and designed the WM pipelined processor. Professor Wulf also investigated the design of scalable high performance memory systems, computer security, and hardware-software co-design.

Selected Publications

Are We Scientists or Engineers?, William A. Wulf, ACM Computing Surveys, Volume 27, Number 1, March 1995, pp. 55-57.

How Shall We Satisfy the Long-Term Educational Needs of Engineers?, William A. Wulf, Proceedings of the IEEE, Volume 88, Number 4, April 2000, pp. 593-596.

The Legion Vision of a Worldwide Virtual Computer, A. S. Grimshaw and William A. Wulf, Communications of the ACM, Volume 40, Issue 1, January 1997, pp. 39-45.

Collaboratories - Doing Science on the Internet, Richard T. Kouzes, James D. Myers, and William A. Wulf, IEEE Computer, Volume 29, Number 8, August 1996, pp. 40-46.

HYDRA - the Kernel of a Multiprocessor Operating System, W. Wulf, E. Cohen, W. Corwin, A. Jones, R. Levin, C. Pierson, and F. Pollack, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 17, No. 6, June, 1974, pp. 337-345; reprinted in Distributed Computing: Concepts and Implementations edited by P.L. McEntire, J.G. O'Reilly, and R.E. Larson, IEEE Press, 1984

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