Clemens Szyperski

Clemens Szyperski joined Microsoft Research at its Redmond, Washington, facility in 1999 to continue his work on component software. He is currently also an Adjunct Professor of the Faculty of Information Technology at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia, where he was previously an Associate Professor. He joined the faculty in 1994 and received tenure in 1997. From 1995 to 1999 he has been director of the Programming Languages and Systems Research Centre at QUT.

From 1992 to 1993 he held a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at the University of California at Berkeley. At ICSI he worked in the groups of Professor Jerome Feldman (Sather language) and Professor Domenico Ferrari (Tenet communication suite with guaranteed Quality of Service).

In 1992, Clemens received his PhD in Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland, where he designed and implemented the extensible operating system Ethos under the supervision of Professor Niklaus Wirth and Professor Hanspeter Mössenböck. In 1987, he received a degree in Electrical Engineering/Computer Engineering from the Aachen University of Technology (RWTH), Germany. Ever since joining ETH in 1987, his work has been heavily influenced by the work of Professor Wirth and Professor Jürg Gutknecht on the Oberon language and system.

In 1993, he co-founded Oberon microsystems, Inc., developer of BlackBox Component Builder, first marketed in 1994 and one of the first development environments and component frameworks designed specifically for component-oriented programming projects. In 1997, Oberon microsystems released the new component-oriented programming language Component Pascal. He was a key contributor to both BlackBox and Component Pascal. In 2000, Professor John Gough, Dean of Information Technology at QUT, ported Component Pascal to the Microsoft .NET common language runtime.

In 1999, Oberon microsystems spun out a new company, esmertec, inc., that took the hard realtime operating system then called Portos and turned it into JBed, an industry-leading hard realtime operating system for Java in embedded systems.

Clemens has been a consultant to major international corporations. He served as an assessor and reviewer for Australian, Canadian, Irish, and US federal funding agencies and for learned journals across the globe. He served as a member of program and organizing committees of numerous events, including ECOOP, ICSE, and OOPSLA conferences. He has published numerous papers and articles, several books, and frequently presents at international events.