Object oriented programming revolutionized the world of computing forever. Barbara Liskov, Turing Award winner and one of the first women to be granted a doctorate in computer science in the United States, shares the story of "the aha moment" when she thought of using objectoriented programming as a novel method for data abstraction in computing.
Barbara Liskov is an Institute Professor and head of the Programming Methodology Group. Liskov's research interests lie in programming methodology, programming languages and systems, and distributed computing.

Major projects include: the design and implementation of CLU, the first language to support data abstraction; the design and implementation of Argus, the first highlevel language to support implementation of distributed programs; and the Thor objectoriented database system, which provides transactional access to persistent, highlyavailable objects in widescale distributed environments. Her current research interests include Byzantinefaulttolerant storage systems, peertopeer computing, and support for automatic deployment of software upgrades in largescale distributed systems.

Liskov is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Association for Computer Machinery. She received The Society of Women Engineers' Achievement Award in 1996 and the IEEE von Neumann medal in 2004. At the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Design and Implementation Conference in 2008, she was awarded the Programming Languages Achievement Award. In 2009, she received the A.M. Turing Award from ACM. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx