Prof. Emeritus John Meyer Selected for 2012 Jean-Claude Laprie Award

John F. Meyer, Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has been recognized as an inaugural winner of the IFIP 2012 Jean-Claude Laprie Award in Dependable Computing for his foundational paper on performability.

The paper, “On Evaluating the Performability of Degradeable Computing Systems,” was originally published in August 1980 in the IEEE Transactions on Computers. The notion of performability as defined in the paper has had a profound impact on scientific research in the field. It is at the core of the dependability assessment of computing systems showing “degradable” levels of performance, rather than systems being simplistically characterized as working or not. The dependability, performance, and software engineering communities have largely benefitted from the ideas conveyed by this paper. Performability is today among the most appropriate measures able to represent a variety of quality of service indicators, properly trading between risk and benefit from both a system developer and a user perspective.

Prof. Meyer has been active in computer and systems research for over 50 years and has published widely on the subjects of of fault-tolerant computing and system evaluation. He joined the faculty at Michigan in 1967, and prior to that was a Research Engineer at the California Institute of Technology Jet Propulsion Laboratory where his contributions included the first patent issued to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

His current research interests concern the development and application of probabilistic models for evaluating the performability (performance-dependability) of distributed, real-time computer and communication systems. He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE and has served the IEEE Computer Society in various capacities, including chair of the Technical Committee on Fault-Tolerant Computing and membership on the Society’s Board of Governors. He is also active in IFIP and has received the Silver Core from their General Assembly for his services to Working Group 10.4.

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The Jean-Claude Laprie Award in Dependable Computing has been newly established by the IFIP 10.4 working group on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance in honor of Jean-Claude Laprie (1944-2010), whose pioneering contributions to the concepts and methodologies of dependability were influential in defining and unifying the field of dependable and secure computing. The award recognizes outstanding papers that have significantly influenced the theory and/or practice of Dependable Computing. It takes the form of a memorial plaque presented to the author(s) (or their representative) at the Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN).