Brent Hailpern received his B.S. degree, summa cum laude, in Mathematics from the University of Denver in 1976, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1978 and 1980 respectively. His thesis was titled, “Verifying Concurrent Processes Using Temporal Logic”.
Dr. Hailpern joined the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center as a Research Staff Member in 1980. He worked on and managed various projects relating to issues of concurrency and programming languages. In 1987, he founded the Programming Languages and Foundations Department as its senior manager. In 1989, he became the senior manager of Research’s Software Environments Department. In 1990, Dr. Hailpern joined the Technical Strategy Development Staff in IBM Corporate Headquarters returning to the Research Division in 1991, where he served as Senior Technical Consultant to the Research Division Vice President for Systems and Software. In 1992, he became Program Director and Senior Manager, Operating Systems Structures Department, where he coordinated the Research Division’s joint programs with IBM’s AS/400 Division and Personal Software Products Division. The department he managed researched issues of operating systems principles, file systems, and multimedia servers. In 1995, he became the Department Manager for the Software Systems Department and in 1996 for the Internet Technology Department. He coordinated the Research Division relationship with Lotus and the IBM Pervasive Computing Division. He was responsible for a group of departments covering workflow, internet server performance, internet software for K-12 education, electronic mail, and applications/middleware for handheld computers. He was also the client product manager for the IBM NetVista product. In 1996, he received IBM’s Outstanding Innovation Award for his contributions to the IBM NetVista product. From 1999-2004, he was the Associate Director of Computer Science for IBM Research. From 2004-2011, he was the Department Group Manager for Software Technology (IBM Research/Watson), where he managed departments researching Programming Technology, Software Engineering, Human-centric Tools, and Workload Optimized Systems. In 2006, he became the Director of Programming Models and Tools for IBM Research, which added world-wide strategic responsibility for this area to the management of his departments in New York. From 2011 to 2013, he was the Director of the Computer Science Department, IBM Research | Almaden. In 2014 he became a Distinguished Research Staff Member, Head of Computer Science for IBM Research. In 2017, he was named Scientific Director of the AI Horizons Network. He retired from IBM at the end of 2019.
Beginning in 2020, he became a Lecturer in Computer Science at Northeastern Universitiy’s Silicon Valley campus.
Dr. Hailpern has authored sixteen journal publications and twenty United States patents, along with numerous conference papers, book chapters, and white papers. He is a past Secretary of the ACM, a past Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) and a Fellow of the ACM and a Life Fellow of the IEEE. In 1998, he received ACM SIGPLAN’s Distinguished Service Award. He was a member of the CRA Board of Directors (2011-2020) and recently completed a term with the NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Advisory Committee (2012-2019).
He was the chair of the SIGPLAN ’91 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), chair of SIGPLAN’s OOPSLA ’99 Conference, co-Chair of SIGPLAN’s 2007 History of Programming Languages Conference (HOPL-III), and co-Chair of the CRA 2014 Snowbird Conference. He was a member of the program committees for the SIGPLAN ’92 PLDI Conference, the Second ACM History of Programming Languages Conference (HOPL-II), the 1993 IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing (ICDC), the AAAI99 Symposium on Modal and Temporal Logic-based Planning for Open Networked Multimedia Systems, the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC), and the Fourth ACM History of Programming Languages Conference (HOPL-IV). He was a member of the organizing committee for the ACM A.M. Turing Centenary Celebration (2012). He was a member of the ACM History Committee (and liaison to the ACM SIG Governing Board, 2008-2012), a member of the CASCON Conference Steering Committee (2009-2011), a member of ACM Council (2012-2014), and a member of the ACM SIG Governing Board (2012-2014). He was a member and chair of the ACM Distinguished Member Selection Committee (2014-2016).
He was the exhibits chair for ACM’s Multimedia 95 Conference and was the publicity chair for ACM SIGPLAN’s OOPSLA 97 Conferenece. He was an Area Director of ACM’s SIGboard (1995-1996), a member of the editorial board for IEEE’s Computer magazine (1989-1992), a member of the OOPSLA Steering Committee (1998-2003, chair: 1999-2002, past chair 2002-2003), and an Associate Editor for ACM’s Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS: 2001-2007). He was co-Guest Editor of the IBM Systems Journal special issues on Software Testing and Verification (2002) and Model Driven Software Development (2006).
Dr. Hailpern was a Trustee of the Katonah-Lewisboro Union Free School District (NY) from July 2002 to June 2005. He was Vice President of the School Board from July 2003 to June 2004.