jtf@SEI.CMU.EDU (John Foreman) (09/26/89)
TRI-Ada '89 will feature Congressman John P. Murtha and Dr. Robert Firth as opening-session keynote speakers. Congressman John P. (Jack) Murtha (D-PA) is the Chair of the Subcommittee on Defense of the House Committee on Appropriations. He succeeded former chairman Bill Chappell after the 1988 elections. Congressman Murtha has an ongoing interest in software-related issues for defense systems and has shown a good understanding of the critical nature of software in the Defense community. Congressman Murtha is expected to focus on the congressional budgetary and allocation process as well as the perceptions and themes existing today in congress regarding the role of software amidst long term budgetary and resource constraints in defense systems. Dr. Robert Firth, who needs little introduction, is very well known in the international software community. He has been involved with Ada since the Phase I language design evaluation, as leader of the UK MoD evaluation team, as a Distinguished Reviewer, and a member of the Ada language design team. He spent ten years at the Royal Military College of Science in England, where he taught Real Time Systems Design, Information Systems Design, and Programming Language Design and Implementation. Subsequently, Robert spent three years at Tartan Labs in Pittsburgh, helping to build compilers for Ada and other languages. Since 1986, he has been at the Software Engineering Institute, where he has led projects on Tools and Methods for Real Time Systems, Assessment of RISC-based Processor Designs, and, most recently, the Distributed Ada Realtime Kernel project. Firth is expected to present a "ten-year retrospective look" at Ada in his keynote address to include a review of the original objectives, what progress we have made towards them, and what we should do now to make further progress.