Three AT&T Innovators Honored by ACM as Distinguished Members in Recognition for Contributions in Computing Technology

AT&T Labs today announced that David G. Belanger, Yih-Farn (Robin) Chen, and Robert J. Hall have been named Distinguished Members by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in recognition for their individual contributions to innovation in computing and information technology.

ACM annually recognizes a select group of computer scientists and engineers from some of the world's leading corporations, research labs, and universities, honoring those who have dramatically influenced progress in science, engineering, business and many other areas of human endeavor.

"This is a significant achievement for Dave, Robin and Bob," said Keith Cambron, president and CEO, AT&T Labs. "Their respective contributions to computing technology help drive innovation at AT&T and in the broader scientific community."

Belanger serves a key role at AT&T Labs as Chief Scientist, where he is responsible for building alignment within AT&T* on technology direction and serves as liaison to external technical communities such as universities, government agencies and industrial laboratories. He played an instrumental role in the creation of AT&T Labs InfoLab, an interdisciplinary effort that focuses on developing new ways to turn massive datasets into useful information, supporting effective technical and business decisions. Under his leadership, the group has developed a broad array of practical and usable software tools, libraries and techniques that have formed the basis for scores of large production systems and services.

Chen is a recognized expert in mobile services, software engineering and Web research. His early research work on the program database technologies provided a solid foundation to enable structural analysis of complex software systems. He later worked on iMobile, a personal mobile service platform, helped to enable mobile devices to access information sources securely through a wide variety of protocols. More recently, Chen performed pioneering research on peer-assisted Video-on-Demand content delivery in IPTV architectures, focused on optimizing the total network delivery capacity to minimize costs for infrastructure upgrades. He served as a program co-chair for the 2003 International World Wide Web Conference and as the general co-chair for the WWW2008 conference. He is currently serving as a co-guest editor of an upcoming special issue on IPTV from IEEE Internet Computing.

Hall has made significant technical and scholarly contributions in the areas of automated software engineering, requirements engineering, modeling and simulation, and network applications. He holds 10 United States patents and is a regular contributor to prestigious academic journals and conferences. His "e-mail channels" process was one of the first systems to provide a practical solution to the problem of e-mail spam, leading to a patent and forming the basis of a startup company. Most recently, Hall's work focused on the OneTESS Network Architecture, a military application for live-training simulation in which trainees carry accurate sensors and low-power communications devices in order to simulate combat situations.