Leon Presser

Last updated September 10, 2019

Leon Presser is an American professor, entrepreneur, writer and software engineer. He was honored by the White House as an influential Hispanic leader.

A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to the design, development, maintenance, testing, and evaluation of computer software.

The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. It is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C. and has been the residence of every U.S. president since John Adams in 1800. The term "White House" is often used as a metonym for the president and his advisers.

The term Hispanic refers to the people that originate from, or reside in, a former Spanish Empire viceroyalty.

Academics

Presser obtained a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois in 1961. He then moved to Los Angeles, California, and went to work in the nascent computer industry as a computer designer. At the same time, he pursued a master's degree in Electrical Engineering (Computer Science), which he received from the USC in 1964. He then joined the computer research group at UCLA, where he simultaneously commenced his studies for a PhD in Computer Science, which he received in 1968.

The University of Southern California is a private research university in Los Angeles, California. Founded in 1880, it is the oldest private research university in California. For the 2018–19 academic year, there were 20,000 students enrolled in four-year undergraduate programs. USC also has 27,500 graduate and professional students in a number of different programs, including business, law, engineering, social work, occupational therapy, pharmacy, and medicine. It is the largest private employer in the city of Los Angeles and generates $8 billion in economic impact on Los Angeles and California.

The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), is a public research university in Los Angeles. It became the Southern Branch of the University of California in 1919, making it the fourth-oldest of the 10-campus University of California system. It offers 337 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines. UCLA enrolls about 31,000 undergraduate and 13,000 graduate students and had 119,000 applicants for Fall 2016, including transfer applicants, making the school the most applied-to of any American university.

In 1968, he joined the Computer Science faculty at UCLA. In 1969, he moved to the Engineering faculty at the UCSB, where he was responsible for the initial development of its Computer Science program. He remained at UCSB until 1976.

University of California, Santa Barbara Public university near Goleta, California, United States and part of the University of California system

The University of California, Santa Barbara, is a public research university in Santa Barbara, California. It is one of the 10 campuses of the University of California system. Tracing its roots back to 1891 as an independent teachers' college, UCSB joined the University of California system in 1944 and is the third-oldest general-education campus in the system.

While at UCSB, he founded and led a research group working on software development methodologies and tools. During this time he also served as a consultant to the United States government and to industry. By 1976, he had published over thirty research papers in the software field, and he had organized and participated in a number of national and international conferences on software. He also served as National Lecturer on Computer Operating Systems for the Association for Computing Machinery. He was the recipient of the Distinguished Lecturer award from the Data Processing Management Association. He was the editor of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 1976 Special Issue on Computer Operating Systems.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is an international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947, and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membership group, claiming nearly 100,000 student and professional members as of 2019. Its headquarters are in New York City.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering with its corporate office in New York City and its operations center in Piscataway, New Jersey. It was formed in 1963 from the amalgamation of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and the Institute of Radio Engineers.

Entrepreneur

In 1977, Presser founded Softool Corporation,^[1] a software products company based in Santa Barbara, California. Softool was dedicated to the creation and marketing of software tools. Besides a presence throughout the United States, Softool owned subsidiaries in Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy.

Santa Barbara is a coastal city in, and the county seat of, Santa Barbara County in the U.S. state of California. Situated on a south-facing section of coastline, the longest such section on the West Coast of the United States, the city lies between the steeply rising Santa Ynez Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Santa Barbara's climate is often described as Mediterranean, and the city has been promoted as the "American Riviera". As of 2014, the city had an estimated population of 91,196, up from 88,410 in 2010, making it the second most populous city in the county after Santa Maria. The contiguous urban area, which includes the cities of Goleta and Carpinteria, along with the unincorporated regions of Isla Vista, Montecito, Mission Canyon, Hope Ranch, Summerland, and others, has an approximate population of 220,000. The population of the entire county in 2010 was 423,895.

In 1989, L. William Seidman and Steven L. Skancke wrote a book entitled Productivity: the American Advantage in which they selected fifty U.S. companies and discussed how they were regaining the competitive edge for the United States. Softool was one of the selected companies.

Lewis William Seidman was an American economist, financial commentator, and former head of the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, best known for his role in helping work to correct the Savings and Loan Crisis in the American financial sector from 1988-1991 as head of the Resolution Trust Corporation. He also worked as an economic adviser during three separate Administrations of United States Presidents: Gerald Ford; Ronald Reagan; and George H.W. Bush. He was lauded by both Republicans and Democrats for his work in cleaning up the frauds of the Savings and Loan disaster, but was pushed out of American government by the George H.W. Bush Administration for disclosing the full extent of the crisis to the United States Congress and taxpayers.

Among other product lines, Softool created and marketed a family of software tools to manage change. These change management tools led to the creation of a whole new segment of products in the software industry. Softool was sold in 1995 to Platinum Technology Inc.

In 1987, Presser co-founded Compass Corporation, a software services company based in Vienna, Virginia. After rapid growth, Compass was sold in 1990.^{[ to whom? ]}

In March 1989, Software Magazine published a special issue listing Presser as one of the 100 people who have had the greatest impact on the software industry.

In July 1992, Presser was honored at the White House by President George H. W. Bush as one of a group of outstanding Hispanic leaders in the United States.^{[ citation needed ]}

In October 2014, Presser was honored by the University of Illinois Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering with its Distinguished Alumni Award.

In March 2018, Presser was inducted into the Hillel Hall of Fame at the University of California in Santa Barbara for contributions to the Santa Barbara community.

Books

What It Takes to Be an Entrepreneur: A Navigational Guide to Achieve Success by Leon Presser
Computer science by Alfonso F. Cárdenas, Leon Presser, Miguel A. Marin
The structure, specification, and evaluation of translators and translator writing systems by Leon Presser

Related Research Articles

Herbert Kroemer, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1952 from the University of Göttingen, Germany, with a dissertation on hot electron effects in the then-new transistor, setting the stage for a career in research on the physics of semiconductor devices. In 2000, Kroemer, along with Zhores I. Alferov, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed- and opto-electronics". The other co-recipient of the Nobel Prize was Jack Kilby for his invention and development of integrated circuits and micro-chips.

CA Harvest Software Change Manager is a software tool for the configuration management of source code and other software development assets.

Platinum Technology Inc. was founded by Andrew Filipowski in 1987 to market and support deployment of database management software products and the applications enabled by database management technology and to render related services. Over its 12-year history, it was known for its acquisition of other companies, having bought more than 50 companies between 1994 and 1999 and growing to become the eighth largest global software company with revenue of a billion dollars per year. Acquisitions included Altai, Inc. (1995), AutoSystems Corporation, Brownstone Solutions, ICON Computing, Intervista Software, Software Interfaces, Locus Computing Corporation, LBMS (1998), Logic Works (1998), Protosoft, RELTECH Group, Memco Software, Softool, SQL TOOLS, Inc., Trinzic, Viatech and VREAM (1996). The company was a member of the UML Partners consortium.

Petar V. Kokotovic is a Serbian American professor in the College of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. He has made contributions in the areas of adaptive control, singular perturbation techniques, and nonlinear control.

Glen Jacob Culler was an American professor of electrical engineering and an important early innovator in the development of the Internet. Culler joined the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) mathematics faculty in 1959 and helped put the campus in the forefront of what would become the field of computer science. He later served as director of the UCSB Computer Center and professor in the College of Engineering and extended his revolutionary view of the role of computers to include their use in the classroom. He left UCSB to work in industry and establish his own company, called Culler-Harrison, in 1969. Culler-Harrison became CHI Systems, and later, Culler Scientific.

Douglas Taylor "Doug" Ross was an American computer scientist pioneer, and Chairman of SofTech, Inc. He is most famous for originating the term CAD for computer-aided design, and is considered to be the father of Automatically Programmed Tools (APT) a language to drive numerically controlled manufacturing. His later work focused on a pseudophilosophy he developed and named Plex.

The College of Engineering (CoE) is one of the three undergraduate colleges at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) is an integrated research center operating jointly at UCLA and UC Santa Barbara. Its missions are to foster interdisciplinary collaborations for discoveries in nanosystems and nanotechnology; train the next generation of scientists, educators and technology leaders; and facilitate partnerships with industry, fueling economic development and the social well-being of California, the United States and the world.

The AlloSphere is a research facility in a theatre-like pavilion in a spherical shape, of opaque material, used to project computer-generated imagery and sounds. Included are GIS, scientific, artistic, and other information. Located at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) the AlloSphere grew out of the schools of electrical engineering and computer science, and the Media Arts & Technology program at UCSB.

Ernesto M. Morgado is Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in Instituto Superior Técnico since 1992. He was one of the people behind the creation of the Computer Science and Engineering degree of Instituto Superior Técnico, in 1988, and one of the founders of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the same institute in 1998.

Donna Auguste is an African-American businesswoman, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. She was the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Freshwater Software from 1996 to 2001. Prior to Freshwater Software, she was a senior engineering manager at Apple Computer who helped to coordinate the development of the Newton personal digital assistant (PDA).

Rajive Bagrodia, Ph.D. is an Indian-American computer scientist and entrepreneur. He is the Founder and Chief Technical Officer of Scalable Network Technologies as well as an emeritus professor of computer science at UCLA.

Jay Ryan Freeman is an American businessman and software engineer. He is known for creating the Cydia software application and related software for jailbroken iOS—a modified version of Apple's iOS that allows for the installation and customization of software outside of the regulation imposed by the App Store system.

Pamela Lopker is the founder, chairman of the board, and president of the software company QAD Inc.

David Richard Henke is an American entrepreneur, businessman, and technical advisor. He served as the Senior vice president (SVP) of Engineering and Operations for LinkedIn, a professional social networking website, from 2009 to 2013. Currently, he is an Advisory Board Member at NerdWallet. He is also a trustee for the University of California, Santa Barbara, and on the Dean's Cabinet for the School of Engineering. He has served as a Board Member and/or Advisory Board Member for a number of companies in the recent past, including successful exits at Avid Secure, SignfiAI, Turn, as well as Sean Parker's political advocacy startup, Brigade Media.

Karl Francis Lopker was an American business executive who served as CEO of QAD Inc and was a co-founder of Deckers Outdoor Corporation.

Linda Ruth Petzold is a professor of computer science and mechanical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is also listed as affiliated faculty in the department of mathematics. Her research concerns differential algebraic equations and the computer simulation of large real-world social and biological networks.

Teofilo Francisco Gonzalez Arce is a Mexican-American computer scientist who is professor emeritus of computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Steven P. DenBaars is an American material scientist, electrical engineer, and academic.

References

↑ Gross, Daniel (November 15, 1995). "Go Configure". CIO. p. 80. Retrieved June 13, 2011.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[1] Gross, Daniel (November 15, 1995). "Go Configure". CIO. p. 80. Retrieved June 13, 2011.