Noah Mendelsohn Email & Phone Number

Lexington, Ma, Us

Medford, Ma

Teaching systems and distributed systems.

Medford, Ma

Taught distributed systems, Fall term 2012.

Designation as an Emeritus is an honorary appointment for select IBM retirees.

Distinguished Engineer is one of the two highest positions given to IBM employees who do technical work. It is an executive-level position with responsibility for driving technology innovation, for leading IBM's key technical teams, and for helping the company to tackle its most complex strategic technical challenges.In the year immediately prior to my retirement, I worked in IBM's Software Group on client strategy and technology, focusing especially on mobile application architectures.

I was appointed as a technical contributor to the TAG by the Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, in Sept 2004. In February, 2009, I was named co-chair of the Group. The TAG is the senior technical body responsible for the World Wide Web.Prior to my appointment as chair, I served as editor for several TAG "Findings" (white papers), setting out key points of Web technical architecture (see: My Publications above).

I was for nearly a decade among the technical leaders responsible for driving IBM's initiatives in Web Services, XML, and before that Java. I was the technical lead for IBM's work on SOAP, and was one of a few responsible for IBM's decision to partner with Microsoft and others to build a unified Web Services technology stack, a decision that changed the direction of the industry. Working with representatives from many companies, I contributed significantly to the design and documentation of several key Web-related technology standards such as XML Schemas and SOAP (see W3C section immediately below). The business impact of this work, estimated at over $1B, was recognized in 2006 by an IBM Corporate award, the highest given by the company. The technology advances embodied in the work were also later recognized as an IBM Research "Extraordinary Accomplishment", the first software research to be so designated since IBM's work on Relational Databases in the 1970s.During this period I also led a prototype team that used compiler optimization techniques to implement the highest performance XML parser and validator then available. A paper on that work presented at the 15th International Web conference (WWW2006) was nominated as best paper -- only 5 papers out of over 650 were selected for this honor.

From 1997 to 1999 I was Lotus Development's lead representative to the World Wide Web consortium, coordinating all strategic positions taken by Lotus. During this period, I also joined the XML Schema working group and was almost immediately asked to serve as co-editor for the XML Schema Recommendation, one of the most important standards in the XML family. My work as an editor involved both detailed design of the XML Schema technology, and writing successive drafts of the specifications. Later, after IBM acquired Lotus, I played a similar role representing IBM in the XML Protocols Working group, and as co-editor of the Recommendation document for SOAP, the XML-based messaging protocol that underlies the Web Services stack.

I was the lead technologist for component software technologies at Lotus, before and after Lotus' acquisition by IBM. In 1996, I proposed to IBM's software group that IBM partner with Sun Microsystems to create a component technology for Java. I led the negotiations with Sun, and the result was a partnership to create JavaBeans. JavaBeans were a key element in Java's success, enabling a degree of tooling support far richer than was available for the language itself. I worked closely with the Sun technical team on the specifications for JavaBeans, and I helped to set overall Java strategy for IBM. I also gave numerous presentations at technology conferences and to the press. My contributions to JavaBeans were recognized by a 1997 PC Magazine Technical Excellence Award, and by internal awards at IBM.Before that, I led a team that brought Microsoft's OLE-2 and COM component and distributed object technologies into Lotus. I represented Lotus in technical negotiations with Microsoft, and at the same time helped Lotus to set strategy for this key technology that came from one of our biggest competitors. I also helped Lotus track similar technologies, such as OpenDoc and Corba.While doing strategy, I also I led a team of up to 10 implementers who built a comprehensive C++ framework to facilitate implementation of OLE-2; this framework, which involved hundreds of thousands of lines of code, was the basis for OLE support in most of Lotus' Smartsuite applications (1-2-3, Wordpro, etc.), and it was later adoped for use in some of IBM's language products.

Ms, Computer Science

Activities and Societies: Research work with Prof. John Hennessy on compiler front ends, Taught CS-105 - the main introduction.

Bs, Physics

Activities and Societies: Did research work on laser physics and on high temperature superconductivity.