Joseph Urban

Joseph E. Urban is professor emeritus of computer science at Arizona State University. He has worked at Texas Tech University, the University of Miami, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and part-time at the University of South Carolina while with the U. S. Army Signal Center. He served as a program director in the U.S. National Science Foundation on an Intergovernmental Personnel Act mobility assignment within the Division of Computing and Communication Foundations of the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering and as the deputy division director in the Division of Computer and Network Systems.  He has published 136 conference, journal and book chapter publications. He has supervised 85 graduate student doctoral dissertations, master’s theses, master’s projects and master’s scholarly papers. He has supervised the development of nine software specification languages. His research areas include software engineering, executable specification languages, prototyping software systems, web-based software tools, cybersecurity, computer languages, data engineering, and distributed computing. His research efforts have been supported through industry, state, and federal sources. He served on the Air Force Studies Board (AFSB) of the National Research Council and was a member of two AFSB software engineering studies and one AFSB robotics study.

He is an ABET program evaluator in computer science. He was the IEEE Computer Society’s International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Technical Committee (TC) 2 – Software: Theory and Practice representative.  He was a member of the Mississippi State University College of Engineering and Department of Computer Science and Engineering Advisory Boards. He chaired the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Distributed Processing.  He was twice elected to the IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors, chair of the Awards Committee, and a Computer Society representative on the IEEE Publications Board and Technical Activities Board's Finance Committee. He was elected the Computer Society's second and first vice president responsible for conferences and tutorials, and treasurer and Finance Committee chair.  He initiated and chaired the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Computer Languages and chaired the Publications Planning Committee. He chaired and lectured in the Computer Society Chapter Tutorials and Distinguished Visitors Programs. In addition, he served as general chair / co-chair for ten conferences and program chair / co-chair for seven conferences. He also served on the Editorial Boards of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE Expert, World Scientific International Journal of Software Engineering & Knowledge Engineering, ACTA Press International Journal of Software Engineering, and as a guest editor for six special issues of journals.

He has received the Computer Society’s Meritorious and Distinguished Service Awards, a Distinguished Professor Award while at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and an Association for Computing Machinery Doctoral Dissertation Award.