Ken Kennedy

Who was Ken Kennedy?

Ken Kennedy was an American computer scientist and professor at Rice University. He was the founding chairman of Rice's Computer Science Department.

Kennedy directed the construction of several substantial software systems for programming parallel computers, including an automatic vectorizer for Fortran 77, an integrated scientific programming environment, compilers for Fortran 90 and High Performance Fortran, and a compilation system for domain languages based on the numerical computing environment MATLAB.

He wrote over 200 articles and book chapters, plus numerous conference addresses. Kennedy was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1990. He was named a Fellow of the AAAS in 1994 and of the ACM and IEEE in 1995. In recognition of his achievements in compilation for high performance computer systems, he was honored as the recipient of the 1995 W. W. McDowell Award, the highest research award of the IEEE Computer Society. From 1997 to 1999, he served as Co-chair of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee. In 1999, he was named recipient of the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award, the third time this award was given. In 2005, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.