Academic Activities

Dr. Avizienis joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1962. Currently he is Professor and Director of the Dependable Computing and Fault-Tolerant Systems Laboratory in the Computer Science Department of UCLA, where since 1972 he has been Principal Investigator of continuing research projects on fault tolerant computing and system architectures, supported by about $ 4 million funding in grants from the U.S. Government, the State of California, and industry. Dr. Avizienis served as Chairman of the UCLA Computer Science Department from 1982 to 1985, He teaches courses in computer system architecture, computer arithmetic, fault-tolerant systems, and software fault tolerance. He has supervised 27 Ph.D. dissertations, 30 M.S. theses, and is the author or coauthor of over 120 publications in these fields of study. His present research at UCLA focuses on software fault tolerance, fault-tolerant distributed system architectures, and design methodology for fault-tolerant systems.

Dr. Avizienis has served as a consultant for studies of computer systems design and fault tolerance sponsored by the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the National Bureau of Standards, as well as for industrial research in the U.S. and abroad. He has also served on several study groups and panels, including a three-year term as a member of the Advisory Panel on Computer Science and Engineering for the National Science Foundation (NSF), membership on the Hardware Systems Committee of the 1975-78 NSF Computer Science and Engineering Research Study, service as chairman of the Fault Tolerance Panel for the 1980 AFOSR and USAF Space Division Summer Study on 'Autonomous Spacecraft Maintenance", and as the expert on fault tolerance for the for the U.S. Defense Science Board 1981 Summer Study on "Technology Base for the 1990's". From 1985 to 1988 he served a three-year term on the Computing Research Board, and from 1984 to 1989 he served as a fault tolerance expert for the new U.S. air traffic control system on the Advanced Automation System Technical Advisory Group of the FAA.

As a member of the IEEE Computer Society, Dr. Avizienis founded and was the first Chairman of the Technical Committee on Fault-Tolerant Computing (1969-1973), and was the organizer and General Chairman of the First International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing in 1971. He also served for four years (1971-1974) as a member of the Governing Board of the IEEE Computer Society. In international activities, he has served as the founding Chairman of the Working Group 10.4 on "Reliable Computing and Fault Tolerance" of IFIP (the International Federation for Information Processing) from 1980 to 1986, The General Assembly of IFIP presented its Silver Core award to Dr. Avizienis in 1986.

Dr. Avizienis has lectured and conducted joint research at the National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico, the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, the Laboratoire d'Automatique et d'Analyse des Systemes (LAAS) in Toulouse, France, Keio University in Tokyo, Japan, the Innovative Computer Systems Center of the Technical University of Berlin, ERG, and the Microelectronics Research Institute in Lintong, Peoples' Republic of China. In 1974 he spent a five-month research visit, sponsored by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, at the Institute of Mathematics and Cybernetics of the Lithuanian Academy of Science in Vilnius, Lithuania, where he also had made six shorter research visits since 1968.

From August, 1990 to February 1993, Dr. Avizienis served as the first Rector of the Vytautas Magnus University if Kaunas, Lithuania after it was reopened in 1989. The university is the former National University of Lithuania,' established in 1922 and closed by the Soviet government in 1950. The Senate of Vytautas Magnus University awarded him the title of Professor Honoris Causa in 1994. Dr. Avizienis is also the President of A. Avizienis and Associates, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in dependable computing and fault-tolerant system design.

Dr. Avizienis appeared as an expert witness before a federal court in Washington, D.C. (Sept. 1988) in the case in which Hughes Aircraft Company protested a $4.8 billion award to IBM to build the "AAS" new air traffic system for the United States.