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Lane Academy Inducts Four New Members

The Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at West Virginia University inducted four new members, Wils L. Cooley, Addison M. Fischer, James L. Hall and Mahamoud Monzoul, into its Academy at a banquet in Morgantown on April 11.

Wils L. Cooley, a professor emeritus in the Lane Department who taught at WVU from 1973 until his retirement in 2006, was elected an honorary member of the Academy. He earned three degrees in electrical engineering from the Carnegie Mellon University, including a bachelor’s degree in 1964, a master’s degree in 1965, and a PhD in 1968. He taught at Carnegie Mellon for five years before joining the WVU faculty.

Cooley developed and, for 25 years, taught a senior design sequence in the department that is widely respected around the country. He also supervised numerous graduate students, conducted research, and published more than 100 reports, papers and conference presentations. Much of his research was focused on improving safety in underground mining. He served as an ABET program evaluator for four years. He received two patents, U.S. Patent 4,209,741 Apparatus for the Continuous Monitoring of Ground Bed Resistance (1980), and Patent 3,608,543 Physiological Impedance-Measuring Apparatus (1971).

He was elected a Fellow of IEEE (formerly the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) in 1997 for contributions to the theory and practice of designing and testing electrical distribution grounding systems for applications in the mining industry. He is a registered professional engineer in West Virginia. He is a member of Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi, Phi Kappa Phi, Sigma Xi, and is an associate member of Mountain. He received the College of Engineering Outstanding Service Award in 1991.

Cooley served for many years as the chair of the Board of Directors of Rock Forge Neighborhood House, Inc., and in that capacity worked with task forces that ultimately led to the development of the first Emergency Medical Services in Monongalia County, as well as the first recycling program in the county. He lives in Waynesburg, Pa., with his wife, Jane Yohe.

Addison M. Fischer, a WVU graduate with bachelor’s (1970) and master’s (1972) degree in mathematics, was also elected to the Academy as an honorary member. Fischer is a principal of Zenerji, founded in 2000, an asset management company with major activities in worldwide conservation. Before founding Zenerji, Fischer was a principal for RSA and also for VeriSign. He is a co-founder of Duquesne Capital Management and of Allen Services Corporation. He founded Fischer International in 1982.

Fischer developed Executor for WVU’s IBM S360 computer, an operating system modification that materially increased job throughput by eliminating most of the operating system overhead required to schedule multiple jobs. Executor was the only commercially successful product that was actually a high-function, high-efficiency replacement for a significant portion of heretofore IBM-supplied operating system software. This led to the founding of Allen Services Corporation.

Fischer also partnered to form Duquesne Capital Management, and wrote a program to analyze financial transactions that contributed to the early success of this venture, which continues today. He also founded Fischer International in Naples, Florida, which produced an Email system for IBM mainframes that, at one time, was used by more than 200 Fortune 500 companies.

Fischer independently investigated prime number theory, and then partnered with three MIT professors to form RSA, Inc., and later VeriSign. Worldwide, he is named inventor on scores of technology patents, primarily in applications of cryptography.

More recently, Fischer has become actively involved in preserving for future generations our environment, resources, health and freedom. He was a principal founder of the Community School of Naples and is a board member of the Amazon Conservation Team. In Costa Rica, Fischer has acquired and is preserving one of the largest privately owned tracts of rain forest in Central America, and by preventing poaching there has the only naturally expanding population of jaguars in Mesoamerica. Fischer is also protecting a large tract of wilderness in Patagonia. In addition, Zenerji supports the Jane Goodall Institute for Wildlife Research, Education and Conservation, of which he was recently elected a board member.

In 2000, he received the WVU Eberly College of Arts and Sciences Alumni Recognition Award.

James L. Hall, a WVU graduate with bachelor’s (1973) and master’s (1980) degrees in electrical engineering, is an employee of Cadence Design Systems and is responsible for the hardware system design of the Palladium series of emulators. He was with IBM in a variety of positions from 1976 through 2002. He is a loyal alumnus who regularly visits the WVU campus to meet with students and faculty members.

As a student at WVU and an employee of the computer center (WVNET), Hall developed software and firmware that connected IBM System 370 disk drives to older IBM System 360 mainframes. That work, which served as his MS thesis, was unprecedented because it required changing IBM microcode – not many students 40 years ago were in a position to “hack” an IBM mainframe disk controller. As a systems programmer at WVU, he was responsible for maintaining the IBM MVT operating system software and eventually he provided hardware maintenance via unique IBM arrangement for that mainframe.

Initially, at IBM, he was responsible for development of custom integrated circuits used in point of sale hardware. The development system for those chips was mainframe based and Hall created new algorithms and design rules that increased logic density for the many other IBM users of that technology. Hall received an IBM Outstanding Innovation Award for this work.

Next, Hall served as the hardware team leader responsible for the design and implementation of IBM’s first Token Ring LAN adapters. Hall’s innovative “shared memory” design allowed IBM to introduce a series of cost effective token ring local area network (LAN) attachment cards for the IBM PC and mainframe controller market. This effective design allowed for media speed processing of LAN packets and set the foundation for IBM to sell tens of millions of these adapters in the upcoming decade. Hall received an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award for his technical innovation, design and leadership in the area of local area networks.

Hall’s last 17 years at IBM were spent working for an IBM fellow who was known worldwide as the designer of the original System 360 I/O channel interface (in IBM he was known as having more patents than anyone else). During that time, Hall was solely responsible for the LAN attachment (both Token Ring and Ethernet) of entry level System 370 and System 390 processors. While a member of the IBM fellow group, Hall received three major awards for his contributions towards networking for mainframe processors.

After experiencing firsthand the limitations of existing (internal and external) tools used to validate logic design, the fellow group invented a processor based emulator for use in validating their mainframe processor chips. This Emulation Technology (ET) evolved with extensive use within IBM and was offered externally via OEM arrangement with Cadence Design Systems. When IBM sold the fellow group to Cadence in 2002, Hall became the hardware lead for the Palladium (ET) series of accelerators/emulators – special purpose, massively parallel processor-based systems that are used to verify the logic design of semiconductor chips before fabrication. These multi-million dollar systems solely and uniquely occupy the top end of the market for hardware based, high density chip verification systems.

Mahmoud A. Manzoul, a WVU graduate with master’s (1981) and doctoral (1985) degrees in electrical engineering, is a professor and chair of the Department of Computer Engineering at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi. Dr. Manzoul joined JSU’s faculty in 2001 as the founding chair of the Computer Engineering Department under the newly established School of Engineering. Prior to that, he served on the faculty of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale from 1985 until 2001. He used his sabbatical leave and leave of absences to teach and perform research at the American University of Sharjah and the United Arab Emirates University. He served as the chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering while at the United Arab Emirates University in the academic year 1997-1998.

At JSU, Manzoul developed two new undergraduate programs in computer engineering and telecommunications engineering. The two programs earned accreditation by the Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET in 2007. At the graduate level, the Department offers the master of science degree with emphasis in computer engineering, electrical engineering or telecommunications engineering. Dr. Manzoul was instrumental in the development of curricula, laboratories, funding sources and the recruitment of faculty and students.

Manzoul earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at the University of Khartoum in the Sudan in 1977. At WVU, Dr. Robert Swartwout served as his major advisor. Dr. Manzoul has been principal investigator or leader in approximately $9 million worth of contracts and grants, including awards from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense. He has served on numerous review panels for the National Science Foundation. He is a senior member of IEEE (formerly Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). He received a Best Teacher Award in 1994 from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He also received the Research Innovation Award for 2005-2006 at Jackson State University.

04/28/2008