Institute Professor Barbara Liskov, a principal investigator at CSAIL, has been named a recipient of the 2012 Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS) Hall of Fame Award. Liskov was honored along with Brian M. Oki for their 1988 paper “ Viewstamped Replication: A New Primary Copy Method to Support Highly-Available Distributed Systems .”

Liskov and Oki were cited for introducing, “a replication protocol very similar to what is now known as Paxos. That protocol has become the standard for consistent, fault-tolerant state-machine replication, and is widely used in data centers to keep the state consistent despite failures and reconfiguration.”

The SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award was instituted in 2005 to recognize the most influential Operating Systems papers that were published at least ten years ago.

Liskov is world-renowned for her pioneering work in programming languages and distributed systems. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Association for Computer Machinery. She received The Society of Women Engineers' Achievement Award in 1996 and the IEEE von Neumann medal in 2004. At the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Design and Implementation Conference in 2008, she was awarded the Programming Languages Achievement Award. In 2009, she received the A.M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery.

At CSAIL, Liskov leads the Programming Methodology Group. Her current research interests include Byzantine-fault-tolerant storage systems, peer-to-peer computing, and support for automatic deployment of software upgrades in large-scale distributed systems.