Oscar H. Ibarra (born September 29, 1941 in Negros Occidental,

Philippines The Philippines (; fil, Pilipinas, links=no), officially the Republic of the Philippines ( fil, Republika ng Pilipinas, links=no), * bik, Republika kan Filipinas * ceb, Republika sa Pilipinas * cbk, República de Filipinas * hil, Republ ...

) is a Filipino-American theoretical

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

, prominent for work in automata theory,

formal languages In logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language consists of string (computer science), words whose symbol (formal), letters are taken from an alphabet (formal languages), alphabet and are well-formedness, well-formed ...

, design and analysis of algorithms and

computational complexity theory In theoretical computer science and mathematics, computational complexity theory focuses on classifying computational problems according to their resource usage, and relating these classes to each other. A computational problem is a task solved by ...

. He was a Professor of the Department of Computer Science at the

University of California-Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduates and 2,983 graduate students enrolled in 2021–2022. It is part of the Un ...

until his retirement in 2011. Previously, he was on the faculties of

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

(1967-1969) and the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Tw ...

(1969-1990). He is currently a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UCSB.

Life and career

Ibarra received a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from the

University of the Philippines The University of the Philippines (UP; fil, Pamantasan ng Pilipinas Unibersidad ng Pilipinas) is a state university system in the Philippines. It is the country's national university, as mandated by Republic Act No. 9500 (UP Charter of 200 ...

and MS and PhD degrees, also in Electrical Engineering, from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

in 1965 and 1967, respectively. Ibarra was awarded a

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative abi ...

in 1984. In 1993, he was elected a Fellow of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific respons ...

. He is a Fellow of the

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

and the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

. In 2001, he received the IEEE Computer Society's

Harry H. Goode Memorial Award The Harry H. Goode Memorial Award is an IEEE Computer Society The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated discipline ...

. He was elected member of the European Academy of Sciences (EAS) in 2003. He was awarded the Blaise Pascal Medal in Computer Science from EAS in 2007, and in 2008 he was elected a Foreign Member of Academia Europaea in the Informatics Section. In 2008, he was awarded a Distinguished Visiting Fellowship from the UK

Royal Academy of Engineering The Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) is the United Kingdom's national academy of engineering. The Academy was founded in June 1976 as the Fellowship of Engineering with support from Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who became the first senior ...

. In July 2015, during the 40th anniversary celebration of the journal,

Theoretical Computer Science Theoretical computer science (TCS) is a subset of general computer science and mathematics that focuses on mathematical aspects of computer science such as the theory of computation, lambda calculus, and type theory. It is difficult to circumsc ...

, Ibarra was named the most prolific author in its 40-year history. He was listed in the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) database of Highly Cited Researchers in Computer Science in 2003 and in the Computer Science Bibliography DBLP.

References

Selected bibliography

*Ibarra, O. H., "A Note Concerning Nondeterministic Tape Complexities", J. ACM 19(4): 608-612 (1972). *Ibarra, O. H., "On Two-way Multihead Automata", J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 7(1): 28-36 (1973). *Ibarra, O. H. and Chul E. Kim, "Fast Approximation Algorithms for the Knapsack and Sum of Subset Problems", J. ACM 22(4): 463-468 (1975). *Ibarra, O. H., "Reversal-Bounded Multicounter Machines and Their Decision Problems", J. ACM 25(1): 116-133 (1978). *Ibarra, O. H., "Some Computational Issues in Membrane Computing", MFCS 2005: 39–5.

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Ibarra, Oscar H. Theoretical computer scientists Living people University of California, Santa Barbara faculty University of the Philippines alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni 1941 births Filipino emigrants to the United States People from Negros Occidental