Columbia University (2004)
Citation

For a career of distinguished contributions in service to the Computer Science community built on a foundation of distinguished scholarly contributions. Seminal contributions in time-sharing systems, networking, performance evaluation, and combinatorial optimization gave rise to founding conferences and serving on many journals. Collaborations with Soviet scientists led to extraordinary efforts on his part to assist them in the post-communist era.

Professor Edward G. Coffman, Jr., has a career of distinguished contributions in research in Computer Science, and in service to the Computer Science community. His service to the community grows out of a distinguished career in research that began with pioneering work time-sharing systems and networking, continued with seminal work in performance evaluation, and includes fundamental contributions in scheduling theory, queuing theory, and combinatorial optimization. Dr. Coffman co-founded the ACM Special Interest Group on Measurement and Evaluation (SIGMETRICS), the IFIP Working Group 7.3 on Performance Evaluation and Monitoring, and the ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS) conference. He has served on dozens of program and technical committees. Dr. Coffman served on journals in scheduling, performance evaluation, and networking, and served as editor of a number of distinguished journals, including a term as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the ACM. He is currently a member of the editorial board of Transactions on Algorithms and the Journal of Interconnection Networks.

Dr. Coffman also enjoyed substantial collaborations with Soviet computer scientists. With the fall of the Soviet Union, he played a key role in facilitating their participation and integration into the western scientific community. This effort included helping former Soviet scientists to get jobs in the west, and also securing a grant from AT&T Bell Laboratories to fund the applied probability and information theory groups in Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg) during the economic crises in the immediate post-communist era.

Dr. Coffman is an ACM and IEEE Fellow. His previous honors include the Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, AT&T Bell Laboratories Award (1984), the ACM Outstanding Contribution Award (1987), and he was the recipient of the first ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award (2002).