CS Professor Recommendations for Udacity

In a Udacity class that I'm taking, fellow students sometimes make recommendations for a professor they would like Udacity to hire. Well they could hire me. :-) See how nice my hands look when I teach online!? They might look even better transparent. Inside joke. :-) I am already happily and gainfully employed teaching engineers, however.

But this did get me thinking about whom I would like to see teach a class. And here's a list that I came up with:

• Deborah Estrin is a professor of Computer Science at UCLA. She is a pioneer in the field of embedded network sensing and is the director of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) at UCLA.
• Sally Floyd was a computer scientist at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. She is best known for her work on Internet congestion control. She was the inventor of the Random Early Detection active queue management scheme, and a co-author on the standards for TCP Selective acknowledgement (SACK) and Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN).
• Adele Goldberg is a computer scientist who participated in the development of the programming language Smalltalk-80 and various concepts related to object oriented programming.
• Dame Wendy Hall is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, England. She is a founding director, with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, of the Web Science Research Initiative.
• Daphne Koller is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University and a MacArthur Fellowship recipient. Her general research area is artificial intelligence and its applications in biomedical sciences.
• Susan Landau is an American mathematician and engineer, and, as of 2011, a Visiting Scholar at the Computer Science Department, Harvard University. In 2010-2011, she was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, where she investigated issues involving security of government systems, and their privacy and policy implications.
• Barbara Liskov is the Ford Professor of Engineering in the MIT School of Engineering's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department. Liskov received the 2008 Turing Award from the ACM for her work in the design of programming languages and software methodology that led to the development of object-oriented programming.
• Jennifer Mankoff is an associate professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests also include mediation of ambiguous, recognition-based interfaces. Application areas of her work include assistive technology for people with special needs and the elderly, health and safety, and technologies that promote sustainability.
• Tamara Munzner is an associate professor in the department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia. Her research interests include the development, evaluation, and characterization of information visualization systems and techniques from both user-driven and technique-driven perspectives.
• Evi Nemeth is an internationally recognized engineer, author, and teacher known for her expertise in computer system administration and networks. She is the lead author of the “bibles” of system administration: UNIX System Administration Handbook (1989, 1995, 2000), Linux Administration Handbook (2002, 2006), and UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook (2010). Nemeth is best known in mathematical circles for originally identifying inadequacies in the “Diffie-Hellman trap,” the basis for a large portion of modern network cryptography.
• Radia Perlman is a software designer and network engineer. She is most famous for her invention of the spanning-tree protocol (STP) for Ethernet bridges and switches and for authoring the quintessential book, "Interconnections." She also worked on Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL), routing security, and numerous other inventions in the networking field.
• Dana Randall is a professor of theoretical computer science at Georgia Tech. Her primary research interest is analyzing algorithms for counting problems (eg. counting matchings in a graph) using Markov chains. One of her important contributions to this area is a decomposition theorem for analyzing Markov chains.
• Jennifer Rexford is a professor in the Computer Science department at Princeton. Her research focuses on Internet routing, network measurement, and network management, with the larger goal of making data networks easier to design, understand, and manage. Jennifer is co-author of the book "Web Protocols and Practice: HTTP/1.1, Networking Protocols, Caching, and Traffic Measurement" (Addison-Wesley, May 2001).
• Dawn Song is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley. Her research areas include operating systems, networking, programming systems, and security.
• Ellen Spertus is an associate professor of Computer Science at Mills College, Oakland, California, and a senior research scientist at Google. Since January of 2009, Spertus has spent her time at Google working on App Inventor for Android.
• Latanya Sweeney develops algorithms and real-world systems that allow information to be shared with provable guarantees of privacy (legally and scientifically) while remaining practically useful. Dr. Sweeney has had significant impact on American privacy policy. Dr. Sweeney is a Visiting Professor and Scholar at Harvard University, was a Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science, Technology and Policy in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and remains the Director and founder of the Data Privacy Lab, now at Harvard University.
• Valerie E. Taylor is the Royce E. Wisenbaker Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A& M. Her research interests are high performance computing, with particular emphasis on the performance analysis and modeling of parallel and distributed applications.
• Manuela M. Veloso is a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University where she studies how robots can learn, plan and work together to accomplish tasks. She was the winner of the 2009 Autonomous Agents Research Award from the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (ACM/SIGART).
• Katherine Yelick is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley and is also the Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences and the Director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is the co-author of two books and more than 100 refereed technical papers on parallel languages, compilers, algorithms, libraries, architecture, and storage.

Some of these people are getting up there in age. Udacity should grab them while they can! Even if they are retired, perhaps they would like to still share their expertise and help up-and-coming computer scientists recognize that the field isn't all young men. :-)