Jeff Rulifson is an award-winning scientist and Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery with over thirty five years experience in computer technology. As Director of Sun Labs, Europe, Jeff is building a new European laboratory for Sun Microsystems Labortories, the research division of Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Jeff is Chariman of the Board of Directors of The Open Group.The Open Group is sponsored by Comaq, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Motorola, and Sun. The mission of The Open Group is to deliver assurance of conformance to Open Systems Standards through the testing and certification of suppliers products.
Jeff is President of the Board of Directors of the Bootstrap Alliance. The The Bootstrap Alliance is a broad-based cooperative dedicated to the improvement of individual, team, and organizational performance in collaborative settings. Participants in the Alliance will find a forum to test new concepts and learn with and from peers and leading innovators who span across industry, government, academic, and public interest sectors.
Previously at Sun, Rulifson managed window systems and toolkits, graphics and imaging platform software, multi-media, applications and Sun technical publications. Rulifson came to Sun from Syntelligence, where he held the position of manager of banking products. Before that, he held the positions of engineering manager at ROLM Corporation, group manager at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, and mathematician at SRI International.
Rulifson holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Washington, and is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Jeff was awarded the Association for Computing Machinery's Software System Award in 1990 "for pioneering work on augmenting human intellect with hypertext, outline processors, and video conferencing that was implemented in the NLS System (On-Line System [1968])." The award was shared with Douglas C. Engelbart and William K. English. In 1994, along with thirty-four other computer scientists, Jeff was honored by Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) as an ARPANET Pioneer for his early work that led to the Internet. The work contributed to "packet networking and the concept of a common language for communications to allow dissimilar systems to communicate." rfc3 established the first set of documentation standards for the original ARPANET Network Working Group. rfc5 was a proposal for a method of sending applets over the ARPANET to provide real-time user interactions over the ARPANET.