The problem in this business isn’t to keep people from stealing your ideas; it’s making them steal your ideas!—Howard Aiken

Taher Elgamal and Anna Karlin are among 111 new US members of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). That’s one-hundred-and-eleven, not seven in binary.

Today we congratulate them and all the new members.

Elgamal and Karlin are the two closest to theory, by my reckoning. Elgamal developed the ElGamal encryption scheme. Elgamal spelled his name with a capital G at the time of his famous 1985 paper but it is lowercased on his own LinkedIn page, on Wikipedia, on his RSA conference page, and by the NAE. Wikipedia explains that he spells it more simply so that “it is less likely to be mangled in English.” Yet his invention keeps the capital G. Ken and I think a good reason for this is that it uses a large cyclic group . The citation also hails his work on SSL and other internet protocols.

We featured Karlin’s nifty joint paper on the metric TSP problem recently here. She is also on the editorial board of the new TheoretiCS journal. I was glad to serve with her on an NSF committee to promote nuggets of theory. She holds the Bill and Melinda Gates Chair at the Paul Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington.

The new members bring the total US membership in the NAE to 2,388. Joining them are 22 new international members. They include Natarajan Chandrasekaran of Tata Sons for advancing the Indian software industry and Hongjiang Zhang of The Carlyle Group in Beijing for multimedia computing.

New Members in Computing

There are many other new members in areas of computing besides theory. Here are some of the new members that work in computer science—including the citations for Elgamal and Karlin.

• Bergeron, Kathleen, vice president, Hardware Engineering, Apple Inc., Los Gatos, Calif. For contributions to and leadership in the invention and engineering product realization of innovative designs.
• Bovik, Alan C., Cockrell Family Regents Endowed Chair in Engineering and professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas, Austin. For contributions to the development of tools for image and video quality assessment.
• Cohn, John Maxwell, IBM Fellow, MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, Cambridge, Mass. For improving design productivity of high-performance analog and mixed-signal circuits and for evangelizing STEM education.
• Croak, Marian R., vice president, Engineering, Google LLC, Fair Haven, N.J. For technical and managerial leadership in the implementation of packet voice networking and for promotion of minority inclusion in engineering.
• Czerwinski, Mary, partner researcher and research manager, Microsoft Research, Redmond, Wash. For the application of psychological principles to the design and understanding of human computer interaction.
• Elgamal, Taher, chief technology officer, Security, Salesforce, San Francisco. For contributions to cryptography, e-commerce, and protocols for secure internet transactions.
• Fields, Craig I., chairman, Defense Science Board, U.S. Department of Defense, Washington, D.C. For contributions to the development of systems and technology for national security and their transfer to commercial applications.
• Hammack, William S., William H. and Janet G. Lycan Professor, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. For innovations in multidisciplinary engineering education, outreach, and service to the profession through development and communication of internet-delivered content.
• Karlin, Anna, Bill and Melinda Gates Chair, Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle. For contributions to the design and analysis of randomized algorithms and their impact on computer systems and the internet.
• Karniadakis, George Em, Charles Pitts Robinson and John Palmer Barstow Professor, Division of Applied Mathematics and School of Engineering, Brown University, Providence, R.I. For computational tools, from high-accuracy algorithms to machine learning, and applications to complex flows, stochastic processes, and microfluidics.
• Levoy, Marc, Vmware Founders Professor (emeritus), Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. For contributions to computer graphics and digital photography.
• Mauro, John C., professor, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, University Park. For developing and applying data-driven models and machine learning that enable high-strength, damage-resistant glasses.
• Nadella, Satya, chairman and chief executive officer, Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash. For advancing corporate computing infrastructure as a cloud service, and for international leadership on sociotechnical systems and practice.
• Nahrstedt, Klara, Grainger Distinguished Chair, Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. For contributions to managing quality of service in distributed multimedia systems and networks.
• Reiman, Martin I., professor, Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University, Murray Hill, N.J. For contributions to network theory and applications in large-scale stochastic systems.
• Sahinidis, Nikolaos V., Gary C. Butler Family Chair and Professor, H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. For contributions to global optimization and the development of widely used software for optimization and machine learning.
• Sapiro, Guillermo, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University, Durham, N.C. For contributions to the theory and practice of imaging.
• Veloso, Manuela M., head, Artificial Intelligence Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co., New York City. For contributions to machine learning and its applications in robotics and the financial services industry.
• Whitney, Telle, CEO, Telle Whitney Consulting LLC, Scotts Valley, Calif. For contributions to structured silicon design and for increasing the participation of women in computing careers.
• Willcox, Karen E., director, Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, University of Texas, Austin. For contributions to computational engineering methods for the design and optimal control of high-dimensional systems with uncertainties.

Open Problems

We count 8 women of the 20 above: Bergeron, Croak, Czerwinski, Karlin, Nahrstedt, Veloso, Whitney, and Willcox. That’s quite a lot better than other rations we’ve observed. How can awareness of this success be filtered through? We also note Anna’s essay, “Why Women (and Everyone Else) Should Code.”