Jerome A. Feldman founded the Computer Science Department at the University of Rochester in 1974 and was Professor and Chair from 1974 to 1981 and John H. Dessauer Professor from 1981 to 1988. He also served the University as Vice-Provost for Computing from 1977 to 1979. Feldman also spent his undergraduate years at Rochester (studying physics), after which he obtained an M.A. in Mathematics from Pittsburgh and a Ph.D. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon. Before returning to Rochester he spent two years as a staff member at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory and twelve years on the computer science faculty at Stanford. During the 1970-71 academic year he was Visiting Professor of Mathematics at Hebrew University. After leaving Rochester, he held the positions of Director of the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley (until 1998) and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Richard F. Rashid was a member of the Computer Science Department's first class of graduate students in the Fall of 1974 (along with Ilya Gertner, Keith Lantz, Joe Maleson, Jonathan Shopiro, and Graeme Williams) and completed his doctorate in 1977 in the field of computer vision and operating systems. Prior to coming to Rochester, Rashid graduated from Stanford University with honors in mathematics and comparative literature. In 1977 he joined the computer science faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, and in 1991 he joined Microsoft Corporation, where he is now senior vice president for advanced technology and research. While a graduate student, Rashid co-developed one of the world's first networked computer games, Alto Trek. An updated version of the game was released last spring by Microsoft under the name Allegiance.
Dana H. Ballard joined the faculty of the department in 1975 (the department's second year), where he currently holds the rank of professor with joint appointments in the Center for Visual Science and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of California at Irvine in 1974. During 1974-1975 he held a post-doctoral appointment at the Laboratorio Tecnologie Biomediche in Rome, Italy. He is the co-author with Professor Christopher M. Brown of Computer Vision (Prentice-Hall, 1982), a standard text, and also wrote An Introduction to Natural Computation (MIT Press, 1997), which is a general advanced introduction to mathematical models of the brain. Ballard is the principal investigator in the National Institute of Health's Research Resource at Rochester, a set of multidisciplinary laboratories focusing on neural models of behavior.
Herbert B. Voelcker was a member of the electrical engineering faculty at Rochester for twenty-four years, where he founded the Production Automation Project in 1972 and served as its director until 1985. He also served on the committee that recommended the establishment of computer science as an academic discipline at the University of Rochester. He moved to Cornell in 1986, after spending a year at the National Science Foundation helping to organize a new engineering division and a new computing directorate. At Cornell, Voelcker directed the Manufacturing Engineering and Productivity Program from 1987 to 1991 and led the Cornell Programmable Automation research team from 1986 to 1998. He retired in December of 1999 but continues to do research and occasional teaching and advising. [Prof. Voelcker unfortunately could not be with us for the anniversary.]