Alexander L. Wolf is a Computer Scientist known for his research in software engineering, distributed systems, and computer networking.
Education
Wolf"s 1985 Doctor of Philosophy dissertaton developed language features for expressing a module"s import/export specifications and the notion of multiple interfaces for a type, both of which are now common in modern computer programming languages.
Career
He is credited, along with his many collaborators, with introducing the modern study of software architecture, content-based publish/subscribe messaging, content-based networking, automated process discovery, and the software deployment lifecycle. Wolf serves as President of the Association for Computing Machinery (Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)). Previously, he served as Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)"s Vice President, Secretary-Treasurer, Chair of the Special Interest Group (SIG) Governing Board, and Chair of SIGSOFT, the special interest group in software engineering.
He has been an associate editor of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Transactions on Software Engineering.
Foreign his research and service, Wolf has been awarded numerous honors, including elevation to Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fellow, and British Computer Society Chartered Fellow. Wolf was born in New York City to Viennese Austrian immigrant parents.
He attended Stuyvesant High School, a public high school specializing in mathematics and science, graduating in 1974. Wolf majored in both Geology and Computer Science at Queens College, City University of New York, where he received his Bachelor degree in 1979.
From 1979 to 1985 he studied Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, receiving his Mississippi degree in 1982 and Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1985.
He remained at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for two more years as a Visiting Assistant Professor and Research Scientist working on the Arcadia Project, which was laying the technical and theoretical foundations for tool-rich, geographically distributed software development environments. Wolf began his academic career when he moved to the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor in 1992. He took a two-year leave of absence to help found the Faculty of Informatics at the University of Lugano, the first such faculty in the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland.
In 2006, Wolf became a Professor in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London.
Membership
In 1987 Wolf joined American Telephone & Telegraph Company Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey as a Member of the Technical Staff, where he conducted seminal research in the areas of Object Databases, Software Process, and Software Architecture.