Alexander Fraser

Education

Degree in Aeronautical Engineering from Bristol University in 1958, and his Doctor of Philosophy in Computing Science from Cambridge University in 1969.

Career

Fraser received his Bachelor of Science Between degrees he worked at Ferranti, where he was responsible for compiler development, and designed and implemented an operating system. From 1966-1969 he was Assistant Director of Research at Cambridge, where in 1967 he designed and implemented the Titan computer"s file system, and worked on file archival, privacy, and persistent names.

He moved to American Telephone & Telegraph Company Bell Laboratories in 1969 where he invented cell-based networks that anticipated Asynchronous Transfer Mode (air traffic management) and co-developed a reduced instruction set computer prototype with techniques for instruction set optimization.

He subsequently became director of its Computing Science Research Center (1982), Executive Director (1987), and Associate Vice President for Information Science Research (1994). As Vice President for Research, he founded American Telephone & Telegraph Company Laboratories in 1996, and in 1998 was named American Telephone & Telegraph Company Chief Scientist.

After his retirement in 2002 he established Fraser Research.

Achievements

• He has received the 1989 Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award "for contributions to computer communications and the invention of virtual-circuit switching", the 1992 SIGCOMM Award for "pioneering concepts, such as virtual circuit switching, space-division packet switching, and window flow control", and the 2001 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Richard W. Hamming Medal "for pioneering contributions to the architecture of communication networks through the development of virtual circuit switching technology".

Membership

Fraser is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the British Computer Society and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.