Design Pioneers with Dr. Jeff Rulifson

August 4, 2021 | 12:02 pm

Kick-off the fall semester with our first Design Speaking engagement, Design Pioneers with Dr. Jeff Rulifson. Design Pioneers is an ongoing series that invites distinguished practitioners in design and technology to share about their work and legacy—much of which has directly impacted the way we live today.

Friday, September 10, 2021
12–1pm

This event will be held virtually and is free and open to the public. Registration is required.


Dr. Rulifson designed the software for the most impressive event in computing history, the legendary “Mother of All Demos” at the Computer Society’s Fall Joint Computer Conference, in which Douglas Engelbart demonstrated essentially all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor.

Rulifson’s subsequent career as a computer scientist is an unbroken series of significant contributions in artificial intelligence, office information systems, research, standards, and engineering management. His work has advanced computer art at Stanford Research Institute’s Augmentation Research Center, Xerox PARC, ROLM Corporation, Syntelligence Inc., Sun Microsystems, and Oracle. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University and is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Dr. Rulifson was inducted into the SRI International Hall of Fame and was named a Bolt Beranek and Newman  ARPANET Pioneer for his pioneering work on a common language to allow dissimilar systems to communicate. His  1990 Software System Award from the ACM recognizes his pioneering work on augmenting human intellect with hypertext,  outline processors, and video conferencing that was implemented in the NLS System.