IEEE Awards Booklet - 2020 - 10

2020 IEEE MEDALS

IEEE Medal for Environmental and
Safety Technologies

IEEE Founders Medal
Sponsored by the IEEE Foundation

Sponsored by Toyota Motor Corporation

Nancy Leveson

Jensen Huang

For contributions to software safety and
for the development of system safety
modeling

For visionary leadership of NVIDIA and the
development of GPU fueling the Artificial
Intelligence revolution

Nancy Leveson's development of a revolutionary new approach to
system safety modeling and analysis tools for real-time systems is
helping to prevent loss of life and property in safety-critical industries including aerospace, transportation, petrochemicals, autonomous vehicles, nuclear power, and medical devices. Leveson spearheaded the evolution of software safety as a new area of research,
but also considers all aspects of system safety including design,
human-automation interaction, operations, management, and social aspects. Her System Safety Research Lab at MIT has created
new approaches to system safety that handle the most complex
systems being built today. Leveson's contributions include a system-theoretic model of accident causality called STAMP (System-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes). STAMP replaces
the traditional chain-of-events model underlying most current
accident investigation, prevention, and assessment procedures.
This more powerful and comprehensive model includes software,
organizations, management, human decision-making, and migration of systems over time to states of heightened risk. Tools based
on STAMP have been created that can be used for both proactive
hazard analysis and post-accident analysis and for new ways to
perform risk analysis. STAMP and its tools have been widely adopted by the autonomous vehicle industry and aviation, are used
in a wide variety of other industries, and have even been used
in nonengineering applications such as hospital safety, pharmaceutical safety, and workplace safety. International standards for
the tools are being created for automotive, aviation, and defense
systems so her new approach to system safety can be used in the
official certification of safety-critical systems.
An elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery's Alan Newell Award, the Nico Habermann Award, the AIAA
Information Systems Award, and the SIGSOFT Award for Outstanding Software Research, Leveson is a professor of aeronautics
and astronautics with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, MA, USA.

Jensen Huang's leadership in developing graphics processing unit
(GPU) computing has helped create entire industries, advance
science and medicine, and transform the way people work and
live. Huang founded NVIDIA in 1994 and continues to serve
as its president and cheif executive officer. Under his leadership,
it developed the GPU in 1999 as a programmable logic chip
for specialized display functions, such as real-time programmable
shading. NVIDIA was the first to demonstrate ray-traced graphics running on GPUs, and today NVIDIA's tools are the standard
for professional graphics used by major motion picture studios,
automotive designers, and architects. Beyond graphics, Huang
threw NVIDIA's full support behind the emerging field of GPU
computing by developing the CUDA language, providing hardware support for scientific computing and developing numerical
libraries. Through his vision and persistence, GPUs now power
the fastest supercomputer in the United States (Titan, at Oak
Ridge National Laboratory), in Europe (HPC5, at Italian energy
giant Eni), and in Japan (ABCI, at AIST). Supercomputers use
GPUs in tandem with CPUs to speed up calculations, where dramatically faster execution times are achieved by offloading parallelizable computationally intensive portions of an application
onto the GPU while the remainder of the code continues to run
on the CPU. Huang realized early on that GPUs are well suited
for the kind of number-crunching math involved in deep neural
networks and machine learning. GPUs were shown to accelerate training algorithms by orders of magnitude, bringing running
times of weeks down to hours. As a result of his vision and commitment, NVDIA's GPU computing technologies are powering
deep machine learning applications that are igniting the modern
era of artificial intelligence, with the GPUs acting as the brains
of computers, robots, and self-driving cars that can perceive and
understand the world.
Named Fortune magazine's 2017 Businessperson of the Year,
recipient of the Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award
(2004), and named the world's leading CEO by Harvard Business Review in 2019, Huang is currently chief executive office of
NVIDIA, Santa Clara, CA, USA.

Scope: For outstanding accomplishments in the application of
technology in the fields of interest of IEEE that improve the environment and/or public safety.

Scope: For outstanding contributions in the leadership, planning,
and administration of affairs of great value to the electrical and
electronics engineering profession.

10 | 2020 IEEE AWARDS BOOKLET
IEEE Awards Booklet - 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Awards Booklet - 2020
