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Internet pioneer Atkins receives Paul Evan Peters Award
(Feb 2008) Professor Daniel E. Atkins, whose work has made it easier for scientists to collaborate online across the globe, has been named the 2008 recipient of the distinguished Paul Evan Peters Award.
Atkins received the biannual award from the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and EDUCAUSE.
The award recognizes notable, lasting achievements in the creation and innovative use of information resources and services that advance scholarship and intellectual productivity through communication networks.
A professor in the School of Information and its founding dean, Atkins is also professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at U-M.
He is now on leave from U-M serving as the inaugural Director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure → at the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Atkins's research has focused on distributed knowledge communities and open learning resources. He has directed several large experimental digital library projects as well as projects to explore the socio-technical design and application of "collaboratories," or virtual laboratories, for scientific research.
His work in this area led the National Science Foundation to ask him in 2003 to chair an NSF Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure. That panel issued the highly influential report Revolutionizing Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure, now referred to as "The Atkins Report," which catalyzed new priorities and led to the establishment of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) at NSF.
In June 2006, Atkins joined NSF, on leave from the University of Michigan, to lead the cyberinfrastructure effort. Under his direction, the OCI supports the resources, tools, and services essential to the conduct of 21st-century science and engineering research and education. These include supercomputers, information management systems, high-capacity networks, digitally enabled observatories and scientific instruments, and software and tools for computation, visualization, and collaboration.
Atkins joins a short but distinguished list of previous winners: Tim Berners-Lee, developer of the World Wide Web; Vinton Cerf, creator of the TCP/IP protocol on which the Internet runs; Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive (a.k.a., the Wayback Machine); and Paul Ginsparg, founder of the huge arxiv.org pre-print archive.
From 1992 to 1998, Atkins served as the founding dean of the School of Information, the first school of its kind in the nation. His vision for SI has been instrumental in shaping the concept of iSchools → nationally.
Atkins also served as associate dean for research at U-M's College of Engineering, where he presided over the formation of one of the first and most effective distributed computing environments in higher education.
Earlier in his career, as a professor in electrical engineering and computer science, Atkins made major contributions to high-performance computer architecture and led or participated in the design and construction of several experimental machines, including some of the earliest parallel computers. He developed high-speed arithmetic algorithms now widely used in the computer industry, and he conducted groundbreaking work on special-purpose architecture including collaboration with the Mayo Clinic on the development of computer-assisted tomography (CAT).
More recent work has included fruitful collaboration with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, leading to such successes as a virtual library federation shared by thirty American Indian tribal colleges.
The Paul Evan Peters Award → is named for CNI's founding director. It will be presented during the CNI Membership Meeting in Minneapolis to be held April 7-8, where Atkins will deliver the Paul Evan Peters Memorial Lecture.
Three nonprofit organizations -- the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) →, the Association of Research Libraries →, and EDUCAUSE → -- sponsor the Paul Evan Peters Award, which was established with additional funding from Microsoft and Xerox Corporations. The award honors the memory and accomplishments of Paul Evan Peters (1947-96). Peters was a visionary and a coalition builder in higher education and the world of scholarly communication. He led CNI from its founding in 1990 with informed insight, exuberant direction, eloquence, and awareness of the needs of its varied constituencies of librarians, technologists, publishers, and others in the digital world.
View a timeline of Atkins's career (PDF).
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Daniel E. Atkins, professor of information and electrical engineering and computer science, inaugural director of the NSF's Office of Cyberinfrastructure, and recipient of the 2008 Paul Evan Peters Award
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