| Another Loss in the Community Posted: 29 Jan 2014 09:26 AM PST I received news today that Yves Deswarte passed away on January 27th. Dr. Deswarte was a notable member of the computing community, with a career of 30+ years as an educator, researcher, and manager. His career as a computing research pioneer spanned issues ranging from fault-tolerant computing to microcomputer systems to networking to issues of identity and privacy to system safety, and more. His most recent affiliation was with theLAAS-CNRS; the Laboratory for Analysis of Architecture of Systems at the French National Center for Research in Toulouse. He also had been an engineer and manager at INRIA, and spent time with SRI and at Microsoft Labs in Cambridge (with the late Roger Needham). Some of his more recent work involved the security of cloud and embedded systems. Yves was the deserving recipient of the 2012 IFIP TC-11 Kristian Beckman Award and an award for Outstanding Service to IFIP. His acceptance address for the Beckman was devoted to issues of identity and privacy — topics which had been central to some of his research in recent years. In addition to his research and his work with IFIP, Dr. Deswarte was also notable for his work with ESORICS, and for the Ph.D. students whose work he advised: his webpage lists 20 Ph.D. graduates advised, and 5 in progress. A memorial page for Dr. Deswarte has been established at LAAS. I only met Yves once or twice, and our work only occasionally brought us into contact. Interestingly, his path in computing had some parallels to mine — he was working fault-tolerant computing (the SURF project) about the time I was (as a grad student), and then moved into security and privacy issues. I have known of him and his work for most of my career in computing, but unfortunately did not have the opportunity to get to know him well in person. I am undoubtedly not doing justice to his many contributions with the meager account above, and I would welcome comments from those who knew him better. I have written memorium pieces for many people in the field over the last few years, most recently Willis Ware. Yves is closer to my age than most of them, so that makes is a little more personal. It is a sign that the field is maturing as we begin to lose our colleagues, but that is hardly any solace. R.I.P. Yves Deswarte, 1949-2014. |
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