David Parnas

Name: David Lorge Parnas

Born: February 10, 1941

Computer-related contributions

• Canadian early pioneer of software engineering.
• Developed the concept of information hiding in modular programming, an important element of modern object-oriented programming.
• Noted for his advocacy of precise documentation.

Honors and awards

• ACM "Best Paper" Award (1979).
• Norbert Wiener Award for Social and Professional Responsibility, (1987).
• "Most Influential Paper" award, International Conference on Software Engineering (1991, 1995).
• Doctor honoris causa of the Computer Science Department, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, (1986).
• Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, (1994).
• Doctor honoris causa of the Faculté des Sciences Appliquées, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium, (1996).
• ACM SIGSOFT's "Outstanding Research" award, (1998).
• IEEE Computer Society's 60th Anniversary Award, (2007).
• Doctor honoris causa of the Faculty of Informatics, University of Lugano, Switzerland (2008).
• Fellow of the Gesellschaft für Informatik, (2008).
• Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), (2009).
• Ehrendoktorwürde der Technische Universität Wien (Dr. Tech.H.C.), Vienna Austria, (2011).

Quotes

"Artificial intelligence has the same relation to intelligence as artificial flowers have to flowers. From a distance they may appear much alike, but when closely examined they are quite different."