Irene Greif
Personal Information
Born: Unknown
Country of Birth: USA
Nationality: USA
Ethnicity: White
Education
MIT SB Mathematics 1969, SM 1972 & PhD 1975 both in Computer Science & Electrical Engineering
"“You learn very different things when you talk to people or interview them about requirements as compared to when you watch them,” Greif said. “People are just not usually very aware of what they’re doing to make work happen, especially in group settings.” (ibm.com);“You can have a family or whatever else you want to mix into your life. You make trade-offs. I can’t say I always got it right, but I can say that I thought it through.” (lemelson.mit.edu); "I have a whole history of always choosing marginal roles and in marginal subjects of research and so on for myself." (jwa.org); "
— Irene Greif
Professional Life
Field of Study: Computer Science
Institution/Corporation: University of Washington; MIT; Lotus; IBM
Degrees & Memberships: Member: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS, 2012); Association for Computing Machinery (ACM, 1997); National Academy of Engineering (2010);
Awards & Achievements
Awards: 2000 Women in Technology International Hall of Fame; 2008 Women Entrepreneurs in Science and Technology Leadership Award; 2012 ABIE Award for Technical Leadership, Anita Borg Institute; 1999 IBM Lotus Fellow2008 Women Entrepreneurs in Science & Technology Leadership Award; 2000 Women in Technology International Hall of Fame;
Achievements: co-founder of the field of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) with Paul Cashman it is the science of interaction between people and their machines; 1988 edited "Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, A Book of Readings," the first book in the field; ran a team in the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science that developed systems to allow co-authoring and shared and real-time collaboration; she and her team produced Version Manager for the hugely successful 1-2-3 spreadsheet program; played a key role in the strategy for Domino, a Lotus web-based business collaboration suite that included enterprise-grade email, workflow and security features; her evangelism of synchronous communications, or chat, led to Sametime, Lotus’s real-time communications platform and the first channel for delivering Lotus Notes mail on the PalmPilot; 2007 her team, in partnership with IBM’s Visual Communications Lab, delivered Many Eyes, a service that connected groups to data graphics to help them collectively analyze information; her innovations include Reinvent Email, business activities, and social bookmarking;
first woman to earn a Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; was a professor of computer science at the University of Washington before returning to MIT as a professor of electrical engineering and computer science (1977–87)
Preferred research over teaching
left academia in 1987 to join Lotus, where she directed its Product Design Group,[9] and created the Lotus Research group in 1992
Lotus was acquired by IBM & she became an IBM Fellow and served as director of collaborative user experience in the company's Thomas J. Watson Research Center
retired from IBM in 2013
is featured in the Notable Women in Computing cards
brought a more people-centric approach to software design
CSCW married sociology, anthropology and computer science, focusing on learning how people actually work with computers, rather than how they say they work
the fourth woman to hold the distinction of being an IBM Lotus Fellow
in her free time likes painting, knitting, cooking and travel
in her dissertation, she published the first operational actor model which in computer science is a mathematical model of concurrent computation that treats "actors" as the universal primitives of concurrent digital computation: in response to a message that it receives, an actor can make local decisions, create more actors, send more messages, and determine how to respond to the next message received
brings her knitting to meetings, makes handbags, hats, and sweaters
holds 1 patent