Oral-History:John Impagliazzo
About John Impagliazzo
John Impagliazzo, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Hofstra University (Hempstead, NY, USA), is an IEEE Life Fellow, CSAB Fellow, a member of Eta Kappa Nu, and a Distinguished Educator of ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). He was elected a Fellow of IEEE in 2010 “for contributions to computing education,” and he has been an active volunteer at IEEE and the IEEE Foundation. He holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in mathematics from Adelphi University, 1983 and 1978, respectively; an M.S. in engineering analysis from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1966; a B.S. in physics and mathematics (dual degree) from St. John’s University, 1964; and an A.A.S. in electrical technology from the State University of New York at Farmingdale, 1961.
Impagliazzo’s publications and presentations focus on computing and engineering education as well as computing and engineering performance, Quality assurance, and accreditation. They include 285 research and conference papers; nineteen books, nine book chapters; and seven technical reports. In his work as a consultant, computer scientist, mathematician, and educator he has made more than 170 presentations as a conference panelist and invited speaker.
He wrote Deterministic Aspects of Mathematical Demography: An Investigation of Stable Population Theory including an Analysis of the Population of Denmark (1985) and he co-authored the English edition of The Legacy of John Von Neumann (1990). He also co-authored numerous computing and mathematics textbooks, including Computer Science: A Breadth-First Approach with C (1995); Computer Science: A Breath-First Approach with Pascal (1995); Mathematics: Back to Basics (1978); and Precalculus: A Functional Approach with Applications (1977).
Impagliazzo chaired the committee that produced the 2016 ACM/IEEE Computer Engineering Curriculum Report (CE2016). He authored the information technology (IT2017) report and is the principal co-author of the global computing curricular guidelines CC2020 project. He served in various capacities on the ACM Education Board for three decades. As a program evaluator or team chair for governments and agencies or as an expert consultant, he has evaluated more than one hundred computing and engineering programs worldwide. Impagliazzo was also the founding editor-in-chief of the ACM Inroads magazine and he created the IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society journal.
Impagliazzo has a strong interest in the history of computing and technology. He has provided funding for the “History Showcase Project” promoting historical displays at IEEE’s corporate office at 3 Park Avenue in New York City and at its offices around the globe. He is also a staunch advocate of the IEEE Global Museum project.
About the Interview
JOHN IMPAGLIAZZO: An Interview Conducted by Maxine Cohen, IEEE History Center, 27 March 2023
Interview #889 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
Copyright Statement
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Request for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the IEEE History Center Oral History Program, IEEE History Center, 445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA or ieee-history@ieee.org. It should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
John Impagliazzo, an oral history conducted in 2023 by Maxine Cohen, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
Interview
INTERVIEWEE: John Impagliazzo
INTERVIEWER: Maxine Cohen
OBSERVER: Mary Ann Hellrigel (brief comments near the end of the interview)
DATE: 27 February 2023
PLACE: Virtual via WebEx
Early life and education, music
Cohen:
All right. I guess we’ll start. Today is Monday, March 27, 2023, a little after 11:00 in the morning Eastern Time. This is Maxine Cohen. I’m an IEEE Senior Life Member. I’m recording a history interview on behalf of the IEEE History Committee. I’m with John Impagliazzo. Am I saying that correctly?
Impagliazzo:
Impagliazzo.
Cohen:
Impagliazzo. We’re doing this on WebEx. I want to welcome you, John; thank you for your time. I guess we’re ready to get started.
Impagliazzo:
Okay.
Cohen:
I think what we’re going to do is start at the beginning. Please state your full name and the date and place of your birth.
Impagliazzo:
My name is John Impagliazzo. I was born in Brooklyn, New York.
Cohen:
Next, let’s talk a little bit about your early life: parents, mother, and father education, kind of a little bit about you in the beginning, and some of your influences.
Impagliazzo:
I was born in Brooklyn and lived there for five years. Then I moved out to Long Island. While in Brooklyn, I lived in a Jewish-Italian neighborhood. I hardly knew any English because either people spoke Yiddish or Italian. I went to school at P.S. 216, and I still remember that, to kindergarten. I had this tiny little woman; I can still see her called Mrs. Metz, who started speaking in English. I hardly understood what she was saying. I was flabbergasted that she was talking about simple things, but I had to really pay attention to understand. English then became natural as I was in school, so the essence of it is that I was very academic. I enjoyed studying. I did pretty well in my classes. In high school, I went to Bishop Loughlin High School. It was a scholarship school. Two students from every parish were allowed to go. Those who got the highest marks on a qualifying exam. It was a very, very disciplined environment. You really had to study to keep up with your work, or you got expelled.
Cohen:
Was it all boys?
Impagliazzo:
It was all boys; yes, it was. There was a neighboring school for all girls. I got very involved with the studies. I was very much interested in electronics and was in the radio club, all kinds of activities like that. Everything in that school, though, was very academic. It was like the Bronx High School of Science or Stuyvesant in terms of complexity.
Cohen:
Stuyvesant, right.
Impagliazzo:
When you went from the freshman to the sophomore year, 50 percent of all the students were expelled because they didn’t make it [academically]. Then you went from the sophomore to the junior year, and the same thing happened. By the time we got to our senior year, there were, I wouldn’t say, a few, several hundred left, but that was small compared to the starting class. Anyway, it was an excellent experience. There I got involved with music. I played the bass violin in the symphony orchestra. I even played in Town Hall in Manhattan. The other part of my interest was electronics. I was very much into radio. I had my own radio station. I was a ham operator. It was good.
Cohen:
Let me just take you back. Go ahead.
Impagliazzo:
Life surrounded me with many challenges in trying to figure things out. Yes, go ahead, Maxine.
Cohen:
Yes, I just want to go back. Were your parents born in the United States?
Impagliazzo:
No, my father was born in Europe. My mother was born in Providence, Rhode Island. We were a regular family growing up on Long Island with an acre of land.
Cohen:
Out on Long Island was really potato farms then.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, it really was. We grew most of our vegetables. We preserved them through the winter. We used the Roman method of burying food underground in the winter, so it did not freeze over, and then we’d dig it up in the spring. It was almost just as good as when we put it in. People don’t do that anymore, but we had the land. We had the land to do it, so we did it.
Cohen:
Did you have any siblings, or were you an only child?
Impagliazzo:
No, I had one sibling, my sister. Her name is Serafina, but we all call her Chicky.
Cohen:
Chicky?
Impagliazzo:
Yes. Yes, that was a nickname for her. She’s very bright but had some illnesses through high school, which thwarted her ability to attend college. She worked as an executive secretary and things of that sort in school systems.
Cohen:
I mean, being a woman or a girl at that time, too, there wasn’t much encouragement for that stuff either.
Impagliazzo:
Right, right. It’s like she could go, and she would, but as you said, there was no big push like today.
Cohen:
Yes.
Impagliazzo:
I don’t think she regrets it, but at the same time, she probably would have liked the opportunity because she certainly would have been able to fulfill it.
Cohen:
Right. She would have enjoyed the challenges, right? Who knows what she would have done with her life?
Impagliazzo:
Yes. Who knows, right?
Cohen:
Yes. I know. It sounds like your interest was in technology and the radio. I like what you also said about music. Many people think of technology and music as different fields, yet many people are talented in both arenas. It’s interesting that you had that combination. You finished high school, and then you are going to college. It sounds like more of a two-year kind of program that you did in electrical technology. Is that the right take on that?
Impagliazzo:
Yes. Back then, it was hard to go to college because there weren’t many around. Basically, I had to go to the city. One option was Manhattan College to study engineering, which required lots of commuting, et cetera. I did commute 100 miles a day to go to high school because I lived halfway out on Long Island.
Cohen:
Your high school was in the city?
Impagliazzo:
The high school was in Brooklyn. It was very close to Brooklyn Tech.
Cohen:
Oh, wow.
Impagliazzo:
It was a daily trip of 100 miles. The choice was whether I should do something like go to a city school or start at a two-year school, so I decided to go to the two-year school, which was quite good and very, very strong in technology. Looking back, I probably learned more in those two years than everything else because the teachers were very dedicated to students’ learning. There were a lot of hands-on things you had to know. I became an expert in color television. I was in charge of that. That was new back then, well, relatively new. How it worked, how you align them so they work correctly, and quite a lot of scientific involvement became my thing in the electronics lab — color TV.
Cohen:
Right. Was there any professor or instructor or anybody that really influenced you or kind of took you under his, I’ll say, his wing? It probably wasn’t “a her” wing at that time.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, you’re right. It was mostly his. Not anyone in particular. I can think of a few, but they were all encouraging. They didn’t make life easy for me, but at the same time, they were very supportive of what I was doing. If I said I’d like to spend two more hours in the lab, then if they were available, they’d say sure, go ahead.
Cohen:
Right
Impagliazzo:
It was that type of thing. I graduated near the top of the class. I think I was the fourth from the top or something like that. I was very good at what I was doing. I would have gone to the top of the class, but I could not do things like physical education. I didn’t do that well. I couldn’t throw a football into a spare tire or something. I couldn’t do that, so I would always get a C in physical education.
Cohen:
That impacted your GPA, right?
Impagliazzo:
That’s right. I understood that I wasn’t good at it. I’m still not good today. I still can’t throw a basketball through the hoop.
Cohen:
Some people don’t realize, and in talking to my own children, that when I went to college, we had a physical education requirement. When my kids went to college, that was gone.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, that’s correct.
Cohen:
It’s interesting how that stuff has changed. Then it looks like you went on to St. John’s University. You were in physics and math. It seems like that was almost immediately after your time at Farmingdale.
Impagliazzo:
Right.
Cohen:
What made you pick St. John’s?
Impagliazzo:
St. John’s came up because one of my teachers, Herb Zipper [Herbert J. Zipper], I think that was his name; don’t quote me on that.
Cohen:
That’s all right.
Impagliazzo:
He encouraged me to continue with my studies because, at that time, after two years, people would generally look for a job. I had a couple of job offers. One was with IBM as a service engineer. That is what it was called.
Cohen:
Wow. Would it be like in Long Island? There was some presence there, or was it in the Westchester area?
Impagliazzo:
No, it was in Westchester, New York, so I would have had to move. It had to deal with some of the power plant things. The other thing was that I also wanted to go to school and learn more because I enjoyed what I had learned. He encouraged me to go to St. John’s, and I followed his advice. From there, I became a double major. I liked education so much that I majored in both physics and mathematics, so I basically have a dual degree. I did that in three years because I had the two years before and would go to school through the summer. I would take twelve credits in the summer, almost like a semester.
Cohen:
Like a semester, that’s a lot in the summer when it goes fast.
Impagliazzo:
Yes. The courses were demanding. They were crunched in these five-week timeframes. But I did it. I minored in philosophy and had a double major in math and physics. Then the question was what I do next.
Cohen:
Right
Impagliazzo:
I still could go into industry, but I just liked the idea of learning. My father was the inspiration for that passion. He was from the Old School. When I became eighteen, we had a little party on my eighteenth birthday. People came over then the people left. My father and I were just with each other. He said John do you know what it is today? I said, yes, it’s my birthday. He said, but do you know what it means? I said, what does it mean? He said that means you don’t live here anymore.
Cohen:
Oh. Out.
Impagliazzo:
You’re an adult; time to leave. Get out. He says the only way you’ll stay here is if you go to school.
Cohen:
Interesting.
Impagliazzo:
So, for seven years straight, I stayed at the university.
Cohen:
Right. This way, you kept your residency, right?
Impagliazzo:
That’s right. Otherwise, I had to get a job to support myself and everything. It was a good lesson. It only took him about two minutes, but it changed my life.
Cohen:
Right.
Impagliazzo:
I never thought of the option that I would stop studying to go to work. It was more, what else could I learn? Of course, those things don’t happen today anymore.
Cohen:
No.
Impagliazzo:
It’s a different world, but in those days, this was in the 1950s; that was how it was then.
Cohen:
He was certainly prioritizing education because if you did continue, you could then live at home. You didn’t have to leave.
Impagliazzo:
Oh, yes. Right.
Cohen:
He was trying to say he would make that doable and have it happen. You said you did music, so I assume you had a ham radio. Did you have any time to do anything else recreational, or was your recreational life kind of centered on ham radio, color TVs, and…?
Impagliazzo:
Music started growing on me. I always liked music, classical music, and Broadway show type things. When I was a teenager in high school, I also started composing music. One of my alternate ambitions was to go to the Julliard School of Music for conducting and composing.
Cohen:
Wow.
Impagliazzo:
This was strange. I had written many music things and one orchestration, so I called Julliard for an interview. They invited me to meet with somebody and bring my music so they could see what I had constructed. On the train going into the City [Manhattan] from Long Island, I’m looking at the piece I wrote. I kept saying this is garbage, this is garbage, so I reached Penn Station and took the next train back home. I said composing is not what I will do for my life.
Cohen:
You never even got to the interview. Wow.
Impagliazzo:
I didn’t. No, it was that I realized that when the chips are down, you know if you’re going to hit or miss, and I knew I was going to miss. I kept up with music in college and studied the oboe when I was at St. John’s. I did pretty well with it. I played in the Broadway Symphony Orchestra in New York down at Wall Street. I don’t know if the orchestra still exists, but back then, it did. It was semi-professional. I had an excellent music teacher, Attilio Marchetti, who happened to live in Queens. Every week I would take private lessons with him. It was supposed to be for a half hour, but they generally lasted three to four hours each. It was terrific. They thought I was good enough to play in the St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra. There was an opening position there. This is in Florida.
Cohen:
Okay. I wasn’t sure if you meant Russia or Florida. I get it
Impagliazzo:
Yes. Right. Yes. They said I was good enough to do that, but I had to study a lot more if I wanted to do it. Then I had to choose whether I should go into music as a musician or go into science and engineering, which I also loved. Back in those days, most musicians were paid very, very little.
Even my teacher, for example, played twenty years with Toscanini, then he played several years with Leopold Stokowski. He played with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic. So, he was very well known in his field. But I say, well, what does he do? He teaches. He teaches music, and he used to play professionally. But how could I make a living on that? It sounds wonderful, but I’m looking in the mirror, saying, can I really do this? I was torn between music [and math/science], and I decided the practical thing to do was forget about being a professional musician. Just let my avocation be the other piece I liked, so I did that.
Cohen:
Are you still playing any instruments today?
Impagliazzo:
No. They’re all gone. I still have the oboe, but I haven’t played it in twenty years. We have two pianos in the house, but I don’t even play them anymore. Maybe I’ll get back to it. I’m not sure.
Cohen:
They say playing piano is good for arthritis.
Impagliazzo:
Yes. Yes, that’s correct. I should do that for no other reason.
Cohen:
Tell me. Right. There are different things to do. I assume since you live close to the city that you still take advantage of going into the city for some concerts. COVID put a damper on things.
Impagliazzo:
I used to.
Cohen:
Are you going to concerts?
Impagliazzo:
Years ago, I was a member of the Opera Guild, the Metropolitan Opera House. I would always get season tickets, but it got a little bit too expensive. I would go in for ten operas a year. I would go in by car, park the car, and have dinner. The opera tickets started getting expensive. Plus, I had a handicapped child. It took much work to do. So, I gave that up. I don’t know if you know how it works, but every year you continue your season tickets, you get closer to the orchestra, so I had orchestra seats, and things were good. Oh, the guy who played in The Odd Couple. Is it Jack Lemon?
Cohen:
Jack Lemon? Jack Klugman?
Impagliazzo:
No, no, no, not Jack Klugman, the other guy I forgot his name.
Cohen:
Right, right.
Impagliazzo:
I see his face but can’t think of his name. Anyway, he used to sit in front of me. [Tony Randall sat in front of me.] That was that, but then I just had to stop; it was getting too out of hand. I still listen to opera and things like that. Now you can see it on YouTube, so you don’t have to go to the city to see it. Oh well, there is nothing better than seeing it in person.
Cohen:
Of course.
Impagliazzo:
It is the second best, and it is okay if I want to listen to it. I met Luciano Pavarotti.
Cohen:
Oh, wow.
Impagliazzo:
I met all these people because I used to go backstage when they were there. Yes, it was an interesting time.
Cohen:
At that point, the performers were approachable. They were glad to have fans. Now there’s just a lot more issues with that today.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, correct. I mean to go into someone’s dressing room; who can do that today? Nobody.
Cohen:
Right. You really were attending during the Golden Era when these people were approachable. It made them so real.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, they welcomed you. They said hello and this and that. But I understand things are different. Anyway, I don’t do it anymore. I’ll go to a Broadway show or something like that but maybe once or twice a year.
IRE, St. John’s, Stony Brook
Cohen:
If we can go back a little bit to discuss education. We were talking, and you mentioned that you initially had joined the IRE, the Institute of Radio Engineers, before IEEE.
Impagliazzo:
Right.
Cohen:
Did you join the IRE when you were a student or when you were a working professional?
Impagliazzo:
No, no, no, no. I was a student, so I probably joined the IRE in 1961. I still remember my teacher coming in front of the class and saying everybody has to join the IRE. It was a requirement for the class. Of course, you can’t do that today. The dues were like $3 or $5.
Cohen:
I was just going to say, was it $5 or so?
Impagliazzo:
Yes. Almost everybody joined it. Of course, I did. I just kept it up over the years, but I only got involved with IEEE a little in the later years.
Cohen:
I want to go to that, but let’s talk for a little bit more about graduate school. I’m just looking at my notes here. You finished your B.S. at St. John’s, and then it looks like you went on to your master’s degree at Stony Brook.
Impagliazzo:
Right, right.
Cohen:
Then you did a second master’s degree, but a bunch of years later.
Impagliazzo:
Right.
Cohen:
Do you want to talk a little bit about those experiences?
Impagliazzo:
Sure. When I left St. John’s, I remember saying I wanted to continue to go to academia instead of getting a job. I already blocked out that music was not my path, so that was good. At Stony Brook, they gave me some fellowship. Not only did they pay all your tuition expenses, but they also gave you a stipend.
Cohen:
Wow.
Impagliazzo:
They gave me, I don’t remember, thousands of dollars a year to go to school. Of course, I was living at home for free.
Cohen:
I was going to say you could live at home, right?
Impagliazzo:
Yes. I was able to buy a nice new car with the money. I had a jalopy before, so with the new car commuting to Stony Brook was at least a little more convenient. There I mainly studied applied engineering. In those days, it was called engineering science or something along those lines.
Cohen:
Yes, you’re having to do an analysis sort of on your TV.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, it was really more like a broad-based engineering program with lots of --
Cohen:
So, was it all specifically electrical or mechanical, or civil?
Impagliazzo:
No, it was the principles of all the engineering disciplines. All the mathematics behind it and the science behind it. It was very interesting. They still have that degree today in different universities for those people who are still determining if they want to become an electrical engineer or a mechanical engineer or whatever. I did that, and I enjoyed it. Then I graduated and started working. It was seven years since my father told me I could either stay at the house or go out.
Cohen:
You may have surprised him. Maybe he didn’t expect you to stay so long.
Impagliazzo:
No, no, he was very proud. My mother and father were both very proud because I was the first in the whole family to ever graduate from a university. They were all proud of that.
Cohen:
Yes. When you said you went to work, were you teaching? There is a part of your vitae where it looked like you were teaching at a high school. I see some stuff as an adjunct, so I didn’t know if you went into industry or teaching. Go ahead, you tell me
Impagliazzo:
Oh, even when I was at St. John’s and Stony Brook, I was teaching high school. They had an adult education program. Okay? These were for people who were in industry and wanted to learn more about electronics.
I think I started when I was twenty-one years old. Now could you imagine a twenty-year-old or a twenty-one-year-old kid walking into a classroom with all these technical people who were working in different industries who wanted to learn more about electronics? As soon as I walked in, the whole class started laughing. That was a real wake-up call that I’d better produce here. I did that for several years. They all appreciated it. I taught all kinds of things about electronics. You know, if you have to teach it, you learn it better.
Cohen:
Right.
Impagliazzo:
I could do just about anything that was doable in those days with radios, transmitters, and all of that. All this electronic stuff really matured because I had to explain it in detail to people who were fifteen or twenty years older than me and were already in the industry. They appreciated it. Some of them stayed with me for three years. I’d keep changing the class with different topics and stuff.
Cohen:
In that class, though, did you have facilities like oscilloscopes, equipment, and things that you needed, or was it a theory class?
Impagliazzo:
A little bit. I suggest minimal stuff, a voltmeter. I think there was an oscilloscope; I’m not sure. This goes back many years. We’re talking about the early 1960s
Cohen:
Right, right, right. That equipment was expensive.
Impagliazzo:
You know it was. There was some equipment. It wasn’t just the classroom; it was a lab. They did some little experiments. For example, I would explain to them about resonance and how that would occur. Then they’d try duplicating it with the frequency meter, voltmeter, et cetera. It was interesting. Yes, I learned a lot doing that. It was once or twice a week. It really made one learn.
Cohen:
Right. Yes, they say about teaching: if you really want to learn it, teach it.
Impagliazzo:
Yes.
Cohen:
Right, you do get a good feel for that. You were working and stuff. Then it looked like in 1978, you got your degree from Adelphi in math.
Impagliazzo:
Right.
Cohen:
Did you pursue that full time and give up working? What was going on in your life at that point?
Impagliazzo:
Oh, well, by that time, I was married. I already had two children. My daughter, Loretta, was born okay, but somewhere along the line, she used to go into deep convulsions. It ended up we still don’t know exactly what she has, but it’s all classified as cerebral palsy. It was hard to do things with her at the time.
Cohen:
Right. That was so difficult then. There was no mainstreaming.
Impagliazzo:
Yes.
Cohen:
People didn’t have any help.
Impagliazzo:
No help. No, no. We connected with the Cerebral Palsy Center in Nassau County, one of the few centers in the United States. There are very few places people could go, so we were fortunate that that was available. I went back to SUNY Farmingdale to teach now. While teaching at Farmingdale, I taught mathematics and the beginnings of computer science. I helped create the first computer science program there. While I was doing that, I also was studying. I went to Adelphi. Adelphi mathematics at that time was very prestigious. The faculty members were a group of professors who left the Courant Institute at NYU.
Cohen:
Oh.
Impagliazzo:
They were very, very good. I cannot say anything negative about any of them. They were very bright. I had a scholarship to go there.
Cohen:
You were doing that though while you still were working.
Impagliazzo:
Oh, yes. Of course, I did it part time. I guess it took a few years to get my master’s degree and then my Ph.D. a few years later. All that happened part time.
Cohen:
Great. Your Ph.D. then was still in mathematics?
Impagliazzo:
Yes, in math. I didn’t do it in engineering because Adelphi didn’t have engineering, so I went to mathematics. But I was always a hybrid. I was a hybrid with math because I liked to --
Cohen:
Was it applied math or theoretical math?
Impagliazzo:
The degree was in pure mathematics.
Cohen:
Okay.
Impagliazzo:
Everything was…
Cohen:
I didn’t mean to cut you off.
Impagliazzo:
No, no, no. I had to go through everything that they would do at Courant. I made it through, and then I had to do a dissertation. I spent a number of years on that and finally finished in 1982 or 1983.
Hofstra, computer science programs
Cohen:
Then you moved to Hofstra; it looks like in 1984. It looked like you started out as an associate professor adjunct. Was there anything between when you got your Ph.D. finished and when you went to Hofstra, or was that just sort of your transition?
Impagliazzo:
No, I was still at SUNY Farmingdale. I was a full professor, but then I did a couple of years at Nassau Community College. I left Farmingdale. The politics were too disgusting there. It wasn’t a pleasure. The only pleasure you got was meeting your students; everything else was very controversial.
Then I had this naïve idea, well, if I need tenure to be a teacher, then I shouldn’t be teaching, so I gave up my tenureship at Farmingdale. Then I went to Nassau, and then a year or two later, I went to Hofstra. Hofstra wanted me because they needed a chair for computer science. Of course, they wanted me to do that to see what kind of teacher I was before they’d offer me the chair position.
At that time, I had already developed several computer science programs. I have given many talks on computer science. In fact, some people used to call me Mr. Computer Science. Those were the times when I had a transition from mathematics to computer science. Since I always loved the science, the engineering side of whatever, it was a good opportunity. I first started teaching at Hofstra part time and then I went full time.
Cohen:
They were checking you out, right?
Impagliazzo:
Yes, they were checking me out. I understood. They all wanted me, so then I became the chair there.
Cohen:
What was the first computer language that you learned?
Impagliazzo:
Oh, that was at Stony Brook. Well, I was wondering if it was at St. John’s. I tinkered with electronics at St. John’s in physics. I don’t think we actually had a language because I guess I did everything.
Cohen:
The circuit boards you were plugging in?
Impagliazzo:
Yes, yes, plugging in on circuit boards, things of that sort. Probably, the official language would be FORTRAN 4 at Stony Brook, which we had to learn on our own. There was no class or such a thing.
Cohen:
It’s very common that there weren’t people that transitioned from math to computer science because there weren’t a lot of computer science programs. I have a similar history as well.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, sure.
Cohen:
FORTRAN 4 was my first language.
Impagliazzo:
In the 1960s, there were no programs. I think Purdue claims they had the first computer science program. Actually, I think NYU did in the 1950s. They did not have a full degree program, but they had something. I think City University had some computer track or something of that sort.
You are right; there were hardly any. In the 1970s, very few programs existed in computer science. That is when they started emerging. That’s when I was one of the many who helped create programs in computer science back then.
Cohen:
Yes. It looks like you really got an early start on curriculum work. I mean, you were doing computer science curriculum, in electrical engineering technology curriculum, it looks like curriculum also should have been your middle name.
Impagliazzo:
Oh, yes, probably. That’s what occurred over the next few decades.
ACM, IEEE
Cohen:
Then, John, I know that you also were active in ACM. You were active in IEEE. We were going to kind of go back to IEEE. At this point, were you more on the ACM side of things, the IEEE side, or just paving your own path?
Impagliazzo:
In the 1960s and 1970s, other than paying dues I was not an active member in any of the societies. There were a lot of problems, besides all I told you already. I also was running a construction company. I was the president and CEO of Aspen Contracting Corp, where we built houses in the Long Beach area, Long Island, Lido Beach, et cetera. I was doing that as a side job.
Cohen:
You hoped it was going to turn into the next Levittown?
Impagliazzo:
Yes, right That was a hope, but it never turned out, of course. That took a lot of my time. Plus, with my daughter and family and all of that, I didn’t have too much time to volunteer back then. I really didn’t become active until the 1980s with the organizations. I don’t know if you want to go on that track or some other track.
Cohen:
Is there anything on that track you want to talk about? It’s your interview, so if there’s anything from that you want us to capture, go ahead.
Impagliazzo:
Yes. I first started volunteering work with ACM. Almost immediately within ACM, I got involved with the ACM Two-Year College Committee at that time. It was a big project in which I helped raise $100,000 or more, which was a lot of money back in the 1980s.
I was at Hofstra then. They wanted me to lead the Two-Year College Committee to develop curricula for two-year colleges, so I did. I went around looking for money to do that because we didn’t have things like Zoom. The only thing you can do is meet face to face at different places, so you had to do that. I organized quite a few meetings to do this. We produced five curricular items. These are all on the two-year level in computer science, electrical engineering, or computer engineering technology; computing for other disciplines; computing for information systems; and computing for lab work, not lab work, but for the technical session segments of institutions. Every university has a tech department to deal with the computer stuff.
People used to get degrees in that so they would be ready to get those kinds of jobs. I don’t know if they still do today.
Cohen:
Your stuff was very hands-on focused. It wasn’t really research-oriented; it was more of the basic tenets.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, the curricula were definitely applied because it was a two-year degree. It had to be an associate degree. If it qualified, it had to be accreditable by ABET, so we did that.
Cohen:
But you were teaching in a four-year program at that point.
Impagliazzo:
Right. What happened was that I gave up the leadership of that. I guess it was 1991. I think I got that right. I gave it to a two-year person whose name happens to be Karl Klee, whom you know.
Cohen:
Yes, we know.
Impagliazzo:
He took over from me. ACM then made me the head of the Accreditation Committee. They had a special committee on computing accreditation, so I did that. It was supposed to be like a one or two-year position, but I kept it for twelve years. Every time I resigned, they would refuse my resignation, so I’d do it another year. In fact, it ended when the CSAB finally merged with ABET. I think they had the official merger in 1999 or 2000, but we went a couple more years to about 2003 before we closed.
Cohen:
Right. I don’t know if it was Karl or if it was you, but I think we were both on a Corning Community College Advisory Board together years ago.
Impagliazzo:
Corning? I don’t remember. It must have been Karl. I don’t remember.
Computing history, Russia
Cohen:
It might have been Karl. I remember I was on a board at Corning Community College doing curriculum work. I know. Then you were doing all this curricular stuff. You were working with CSAB, which then became ABET.
You also got involved in history. How does history fit in because I know you used history to teach computer science? Do you want to chat a little bit about that?
Impagliazzo:
Sure. I had to get some cobwebs spread out a little bit. Let’s see, this has to go back to the 1990s again. Some of the things I did there was to get involved with history through JAN Lee [John A. N. Lee goes by JAN Lee]. Lee is well known in the IEEE circles. He started the Journal on Computing History with the IEEE Computer Society. JAN and I (I forgot how we first got involved) became friends in the 1990s. JAN was the chair of the IFIP History Committee. He had been doing that for a number of years, and he wanted someone to take over. It was around 1999 or so.
Cohen:
I just want to stop you for a second. IFIP was the International Federation of --
Impagliazzo:
International Federation of Information Processing.
Cohen:
We have that acronym. Go ahead.
Impagliazzo:
IFIP is like the United Nations of Computing. Every country has one representative from its major society. It meets periodically. Then IFIP has a set of technical committees. They are called TCs, technical committees.
Technical Committee 9 was on the social impact of computing society. One of the sub-units of TC9 was its 9.7 Committee on the History of Computing. JAN actually started that. Then I took over around 1999 and 2000, and I became very much involved in history, which ended up producing seven books on it. Now these were from conferences I had organized.
Cohen:
Were these proceedings of the conferences?
Impagliazzo:
Yes, they are the proceedings. Springer was the publisher.
I got very much involved not only in organizing the conferences but also in developing the books that went along with them. We did three books on the history of computing education. As soon as the idea of trying to generate more history into computing, people were saying, well, why don’t you do history of X?
One of the things that occurred was that I took a sabbatical. I spent my sabbatical time in Sweden at Uppsala University, the traditional university of all Nordic countries. It was the first university. It goes back to 1300 or 1400 or something like that. It has many, many Nobel Prize winners. I spent my sabbatical there. I got involved with a lot of people who were interested in the history of computing. I started giving many talks on it. I did it in Sweden. I did many talks in Denmark at the Danish Polytechnic University.
Cohen:
Were these talks in English, or are you fluent in one of these foreign languages?
Impagliazzo:
No, no, no. Springer only produces books in English because they have to be worldwide. They’re still out there. They still sell them. Of course, I don’t make anything on it, but Springer does. If you look up searching for books on Amazon, you’ll find them. They’re still being sold for $100 or more.
Cohen:
Wow, so they were expensive.
Impagliazzo:
They’re not only expensive, but they’re also still in demand.
Cohen:
Wow.
Impagliazzo:
Otherwise, they’d be sold for $2. Anyway, the history of computing education produced three of those books from different conferences. Then we went on to Nordic computing. No, not Scandinavian, but Nordic. Scandinavia is Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, but if you add Iceland and Finland, those are Nordic countries.
Cohen:
A little geography lesson.
Impagliazzo:
I learned about that. Yes, you got to. Otherwise, if you tell a Finn they’re Scandinavian, they’ll punch you in the nose. Tell them they are Nordic.
Then we produced four conferences on Nordic computing. I helped organize three of them. The fourth one, another group did. Books came out on that. I think the most significant achievement was the Perspectives on Soviet Russian Computing.
Cohen:
How did you get involved with that?
Impagliazzo:
It took me about five years to get that going. I made many trips to Russia and tried to organize it, but the question always came up, why is an American trying to make Russian history or Soviet history? They got over that. I have a copy. I have the book here.
Cohen:
Wow, okay.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, that’s the book from Springer on that. This one is very well known because it’s one of the first books ever produced on this. It’s on this topic. There have been papers written about all of this, but hardly ever did a conference occur where Springer was going to produce the book for it.
Cohen:
The conference was in Russia?
Impagliazzo:
It was in Russia. It was in Petrozavodsk. Petrozavodsk is a city on Lake Onega, which is, let’s see, on a train ride, it was about nine hours north of St. Petersburg and fifteen hours from Moscow.
Cohen:
Were you affiliated, or did you have connections with the university there?
Impagliazzo:
Yes.
Cohen:
How did you find your connection, your people?
Impagliazzo:
I had a friend who was a faculty member there. We met; it was in the 1990s. Then I kept asking why we don’t have a conference about this. Of course, he helped to make connections. It got as far as the Russian Academy of Sciences got involved. I met with the head of the Academy, Viktor Ivannikov, which was an interesting meeting. They were very skeptical of this, you know? What am I doing trying to promote Soviet history? It was one of the things that made the whole idea of this conference come alive because now the Russian Academy of Sciences was sponsoring it. This is not just John trying to do it.
It was always this kind of confrontation with some of the people involved that I was not only looking at the technical side of Soviet history, like the computing history, but the educational side. They didn’t consider education, computing education, as anything legitimate. That’s what teachers study. That’s what you study at schools of education, pedagogy. What does that have to do with this technical stuff about history?
We finally agreed after a little bit of combat that we’ll have both parts at this conference. We’ll not only have the technical side, but also the educational side. We’ll keep it as a thread within the conference. So, they agreed to that. They said yes, that would be good. We went ahead with it.
Ivanakov was very pleased and gave his blessing. Once he gave his blessings, the conference went forward. I had to raise quite a bit of money for the conference. I raised, oh, I don’t know, probably $80,000, something in that ballpark. IEEE was very generous in helping. I think the IEEE Computer Society gave me some money. The IEEE Foundation gave money. In fact, one of the images from the conference, one of the pictures was the homepage of the IEEE Foundation. It was that for more than one year.
People believed in this. ACM supported it. IEEE supported it. Many other groups and industry gave a little bit of money. Nobody gave a tremendous amount of money. The largest was $5,000. Why did I need this money? I needed this money to get the Soviet pioneers to be able to go from their hometowns to Petrozavodsk and stay there for a week at a hotel. Right? The conference was a whole week from Monday through Friday. These people don’t have any money. Their pension at that time, probably even today, is only a few hundred dollars a month, so how are they going to pay for airplanes? How are they going to pay for hotels, trains, whatever, and food? We had to finance the whole thing so they could stay for free.
It was really wonderful. These people are some of the greatest people of their time. They lived in the shroud of secrecy. They knew each other’s work but could never talk to each other about it. It was forbidden under the Communist thing. Even though it was past the fall of the Soviet Union, we’re talking about 2006, they still lived in this “I’m not allowed to speak with anybody. I could only speak to them if I get orders from the Kremlin.” That’s the mentality.
Cohen:
How did you communicate with them because I assume they were not fluent in English.
Impagliazzo:
Oh, no, no. They spoke in their own language.
Cohen:
You had translators?
Impagliazzo:
There was a translation in English for those who, like me, needed the translation. It was really magnificent to see them together, talking to each other. Even today, it gives me goosebumps that these people who were ostracized from each other for so many decades finally all got together in one place and were able to speak with each other. We had people from all over: from Siberia, from Ukraine, from Belarus, from all over. They all came to Petrozavodsk and stayed there for a week with each other.
Cohen:
How many other Americans were at this conference besides you?
Impagliazzo:
There were several. I would say maybe five. I can’t remember who was there, but some five. Some were historians. Some people from different countries in Europe also went because this was marvelous. This never happened before. How could this happen, this conference in Russia?
Cohen:
Besides the book you showed me, is there any other record of this? Is it documented anywhere else?
Impagliazzo:
Sure. If you go to SORUCOM, sorucom.org, you will get the conference. There were four conferences after that because it was so spectacular that they said we must do it again. I said, well, I did my share. If you want to do it, do it again, but get somebody to do it, so they did. They did it in several places. If you look on the website, SORUCOM original, then SORUCOM 1 2, 3, 4, you’ll see my name as part of the organizing committee or something like that.
Cohen:
The organizing committee.
Impagliazzo:
I didn’t actually play an active role in it, but they all recognized that I did this, so they were proud of it. Now they have records. IEEE published the last one. Springer did the first one that I showed you. Then IEEE produced the proceedings and the conference proceedings after that. I didn’t follow up with them. They invited me to speak. They invited me. But you know there’s no support to go there. I couldn’t take a week off. I was teaching or whatever.
Cohen:
It’s amazing that that happened with the stuff that you’re saying needed to happen to make it work to get approvals and everything. Did you have any trouble from the United States side with going to Russia?
Impagliazzo:
No. I don’t know if they were tracking me.
Cohen:
Yes, right, right, right.
Impagliazzo:
If they were, fine, but we weren’t doing anything illegitimate.
Cohen:
Right, no, no. It sounded like you were documenting what you were doing and getting approvals of what you were doing. But you’re right; you might very well have been tracked or monitored or something.
Impagliazzo:
I really don’t care if they did; it’s human. Let them. If they don’t like this book, okay. If the CIA doesn’t want this book, too bad.
Cohen:
Right. Right. Do you want to continue talking a little bit about some of your other international forays? I know you did some stuff in Qatar.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, Qatar.
Cohen:
Do you want to go in that direction, or do you want to go a little bit more into your IEEE involvement? You tell me.
Impagliazzo:
All right. This book is the seventh of the history production books that came out on history. My name is on the cover because I produced it and all of that, but it’s rare to get so many books out. I’m sure there are others, so I hope IEEE History Center appreciates it. I asked Mike Geselowitz if he had any. He’s the head of the IEEE History Center. I asked if he had any of my books; they don’t have any.
Cohen:
Do you have some copies that you can donate to their archives at the IEEE History Center?
Impagliazzo:
I have a couple of extras. I only usually have one of each.
Cohen:
I’m sure if you have extras, I assume they have some facility to take them.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, but I don’t think they have room to place all these things because if they did it for me, I guess they have to do it for everybody.
Cohen:
John, they will take your books, the proceedings from the Russian computer history conferences. They will do it for you.
Impagliazzo:
I don’t know. They just don’t care or don’t have an interest; I don’t know. Maybe things will change later on. It would be good if anybody wrote history books that the IEEE History Center would say, yes, it’s our mission to collect every history book that was produced by an IEEE member. We’ll have to store it someplace, but they don’t have any place to store it, so it’s like a circle.
Cohen:
Oh, speaking of history, I guess I want to come back to one other question about history. One of the things I’ve seen in some of the technical disciplines, when they try to add new parts to it, new things that now have to be included in the curriculum, there is the feeling that the curriculum is already jam-packed. What do we take out? Did you have a lot of resistance from people not wanting to do history because they felt that it belonged in the history discipline as opposed to a computer course? Did they question whether a computer science graduate needed to understand the history to do their job?
Impagliazzo:
I don’t think we need a course. I mean, that would be nice. But if we tell somebody we’re going to eliminate the algorithms course and replace it with a history course, I think it’d be easier to shoot me than to do that. Probably, I think the theme I pushed for twenty-something years was using history to teach computing. Whenever I would teach a class, okay, say on architecture, I would always spend five or ten minutes starting a new topic on its background. The students may have some idea of what’s happening. If I were talking about a computer, I would ask the class who invented the computer. Of course, they would say, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and of course, that’s all wrong. I would actually ask them to go out and search for this. What was the first computer? All right, back in the 1990s and 2000s, you had the ability, because of search engines, to get some of this information without going to libraries or things like that. Even if it were inaccurate, it would be something, you know? I would, like caching.
Maurice Wilkes invented that idea back in 1966. By the way, I had lunch with Maurice once. I forgot where I was. It was in Europe someplace. We all went to lunch, and here’s this guy sitting by himself at a table. There was a student next to him who didn’t know him. The student was having his lunch, and Maurice was sitting there. I go, oh my God, so I go up and said, “May I join you? Of course, he said yes. We had a nice chat about some of the things he did. The student was listening, listening, listening; he was amazed.
Cohen:
Right, didn’t realize, yes.
Impagliazzo:
He didn’t realize who he was sitting with. That was interesting. The same thing happens with, oh, I lost his name. He was at Stanford. He invented the technical language TeX. It’ll come back. I have all his books downstairs; I can’t think of his name.
Cohen:
Lex Herman?
Impagliazzo:
No, Knuth.
Cohen:
Knuth.
Impagliazzo:
Donald Knuth, yes. I was in Greece. Here’s Knuth. He’s sitting on a balcony. We were all on a balcony. We’re having an evening snack. It was almost sunset. Here’s Don Knuth, sitting by himself in a corner. I said this can’t be; I can’t allow this to be. I went over to Don, and I said: Don, I’m John, et cetera; I said, “Why don’t you come join us?” It was a table outside near the balcony. I said why don’t you join us and have dinner with us. He said, yes, sure. I walk him over to this table. The people didn’t know who he was at the beginning, but then they realized who it was. It was like a world-famous computer scientist.
It’s amazing how these things happen, even the well-known people such as Wilkes and Knuth. They just don’t connect. Somehow, they don’t connect. They don’t see the history of it until somebody emerges with the idea. Those are the kinds of things I like to do. But they happen. Back to the question: I think using history to teach computing is probably the best way to go. Every teacher can take oh, ten minutes out of a class time or five minutes out of a class to talk about the background of something they’re about to teach. Even if it’s mathematics or if it’s science, somebody invented something or did some experiment to make something happen, make the connection. Because I hated history when I was in college because all I did was remember dates, generals, and wars. In other words, it was just memorization of all these things: who shot who, who won, that was history the way I was taught. It was just a sequence of events where you had to remember all the dates, all the people, and all the places. I hated that because that didn’t make any sense to me. But when it was used in the context of something, it was useful.
Cohen:
Yes. I think one of the things with computers, maybe I have a similar bias to you, too, is we have to understand how far we’ve come with some of this. We don’t understand it unless we look back and see how some of these things played a part.
Impagliazzo:
Yes.
Cohen:
It’s another whole discussion.
Impagliazzo:
That’s another topic.
Cohen:
Right, right, right. That’s another whole discussion.
Impagliazzo:
So.
Cohen:
Do we want to go -- I feel like we kind of took a couple of diverging paths here.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, we did.
IEEE volunteer activities
Cohen:
That’s that. Do we want to go back a little bit more on some of your other international experiences? Do you want to talk a little bit more about that? Do you want to talk a little bit more about your involvement with IEEE?
Impagliazzo:
Yes, well let’s…
Cohen:
Some of your volunteer stuff?
Impagliazzo:
Yes, let’s do IEEE.
Cohen:
Okay.
Impagliazzo:
I’ll continue the story, well, the history. Since I was the IFIP history person, I started producing these conference books related to them. I guess people in IEEE took notice. I’m sure Jan Lee had something to do with it. Jan is the person who got me involved with IFIP. I got an invitation to join the IEEE History Committee back in, I guess, 2000, 2001, or something like that, so I did. Then I stayed with them for about six years because you have to rotate off. That’s how I got involved with the IEEE.
I did earthshaking things with the IEEE History Center and the IEEE History Committee back then. First of all, there was total confusion on monetary flow, right? Somehow, I became the treasurer of the IEEE History Center or IEEE History Committee. I forgot which one was which. But I was on the IEEE History Committee. I was not a staff person at the IEEE History Center.
Cohen:
Was this a volunteer position?
Impagliazzo:
Yes, this is all volunteer. One of the things I did was to streamline the finances because it was difficult at that time to know where the finances came from. I mean, they could probably document the expenses, but financing was bad. I had a background in the construction company, so I knew about financing, so I did a bunch of that and actually made it work. I made some flow diagrams on how money comes in and out, this and that.
Then one of the other things that came up, which now is a legacy, was that I was always disappointed that IEEE never recognized people over the years who gave money. That you could have somebody who has been an IEEE member for thirty, forty years, maybe they gave, I don’t know, $500 a year, but it would never accumulate anything. There was just another Joe Doe, thank you, and that’s it. I proposed to the IEEE Foundation, which at that time hardly anybody knew about, including the Board of Directors, that we should recognize people for their long-term giving, not just what they gave in one year. That was the birth of the Heritage Circle. I proposed that to Gowen [Richard (Dick) Gowen], who was a big proponent of it. We had a meeting. I’ve been in meetings with the past presidents of IEEE, who had to go through all of this stuff to see if it made any sense. It did. They finally decided to start this Heritage Circle. I think it became effective in 2008 or something like that. The cutoff date for starting it was 1995 because they didn’t have good records before then. They only had paper records before 1995. They only had electronic, digital records starting in 1995. That became the start date. Somehow, it’s twenty-five years, going on thirty years, where people who have given money over this period could get recognition through the Heritage Circle if they wanted to. They would automatically get it because now it’s recorded.
Cohen:
Right.
Impagliazzo:
They’ll just add it up until you cross the $10,000 line.
Then I came off the IEEE History Committee and eventually went back. Then I went back on the IEEE History Committee for a year or two. Then I became a member of the IEEE Foundation. The IEEE Foundation took up this history, the Heritage Circle. Then we started another circle for the wealthy or the industry types, so there were two Heritage Circles, one for members and one for corporations.
Institutions. That worked for a while. But then, I guess a couple of years ago, they merged the two. They made one Heritage Circle because it was very confusing which circle you were in and because each plateau was different. I think the lower limit was $50,000 or something like that. That was one of the things I was proud to do for IEEE.
Cohen:
Yes, I think that they just recently, this last year, added two new categories to it.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, they modified it because they combined the original one with the industry one, so they certainly could add more levels to that. That was good. I was proud of that.
Cohen:
That’s separate from people that want to do some sort of thing in their will as well, so that’s another…
Impagliazzo:
Yes, this is while one is alive. It’s the total accumulation.
Cohen:
I know that you’re still involved in now IEEE SSIT [IEEE Society on the Social Implications of Technology]. You’re involved in that group.
Impagliazzo:
Yes.
Cohen:
You were on the Life Members Committee. What other IEEE activities are you doing?
Impagliazzo:
Not much. Well, I worked with the IEEE Computer Society in the early 2000s. In fact, they even gave me an award: Outstanding Contributions Award. That had to do with curricula.
Cohen:
You were also -- oh. No, go ahead.
Impagliazzo:
No. With the SSIT I created a new journal for them which is in its third or fourth year. We started that because SSIT is a relatively poor society. I mean, it’s a small membership. It is one of those horizontal societies. I think it’s probably the only one. All these Societies within IEEE are siloed. This is Computers [IEEE Computer Society]. This is this. This is Power [IEEE Power and Energy Society]. But SSIT cuts across them, so we have a magazine that has been around for more than fifty years.
Cohen:
Technology and Society, right?
Impagliazzo:
Right, Technology and Society Magazine. It was important to get transactions, so people could produce research because, with magazines, you’re probably not interested in researching. That’s not a topic for a magazine. Maybe a summary might be good, but not for research papers. I created that. That got approved. I worked on that for about three or four years. It finally got approved in 2018. It got launched in 2020. I think that’s a good achievement
Cohen:
Do you have an editorial board, the whole bit?
Impagliazzo:
I don’t. The editor-in-chief [EIC] does. I’m only the VP for Publications versus IT. I deal with the mechanics, the back-scene stuff. The editor-in-chief is in charge of the publication. This happens to be Katina Michael, who is excellent. She runs her own ship. The magazine has its own EIC, and he runs his own ship: Jeremy Pitt. He’s a very good scholar from the U. K. He does the magazine, and she does the transactions. I also created the newsletter. SSIT had a newsletter, but it was a hodgepodge. It would come out maybe once a year or so. I put that on track and now it’s a monthly newsletter. As you know Heather is the new EIC.
Cohen:
Right, Heather Love, right.
Impagliazzo:
Yes. That came about not only because of my doing but because we wanted some consistency in the communication with members of SSIT. That goes to all members.
Cohen:
You’re in SSIT, and you’re on the Board at this point.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, right. I’m on the Strategic Planning Committee and, of course, its Board of Governors, and the Life Members Committee.
Cohen:
The LMC, the Life Members Committee. Again, you were the IEEE Foundation representative, so you also brought your financial hat to bear to try to get some of those finances, I’ll say, a little better organized.
Impagliazzo:
Yes. I hope so
Cohen:
Accountable.
Impagliazzo:
We’ll see where it goes. Yes, these, as you know, are just temporary positions. You’re on it. You have to cycle in and out. If you don’t do cycling, I think it isn’t good because you don’t get new ideas, you always have the same people with the same ideas. With the IEEE Foundation, with the IEEE History Committee, with the Life Member Committee, with SSIT, I think it’s good that there’s rotation. I’ve been in the SSIT position for maybe eight years, so it’s time to get rid of me.
Cohen:
I think that’s why we’re even doing some of these interviews is that it’s not a question of getting rid of you but making sure some of the accomplishments that you have done, things you’ve contributed are still recognized. I want to talk for a minute about recognition. You were nominated and became an IEEE Life Fellow, correct?
Impagliazzo:
Yes. Well, a Life Member also, that’s automatic.
Cohen:
Right.
Impagliazzo:
But for an IEEE Fellow, I had to go into the competition with the others. Yes. It was more complicated when I applied fifteen years ago, I guess that’s when it was. You have to have ten major, well, ten significant accomplishments you had to document. You also had to single out three of them as being sort of spectacular or having an impact on the world or something like that, so that was the Fellow. The Life Fellow is just a combination of the two.
Cohen:
Right, it’s a matter of time before adding the word Life to the Fellow. Have you been the recipient of any other IEEE awards or medals or any other IEEE stuff?
Impagliazzo:
Yes, the IEEE Computer Society’s Outstanding Contributions Award, I think that’s it.
Cohen:
A lot of people started as a Computer Society member, and then went over fully to IEEE, but you were a full IEEE member.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, I was. Right.
Cohen:
You were a member of the IEEE Computer Society.
Impagliazzo:
Yes.
Cohen:
Then you’ve also gotten some awards from ACM. There are several awards you’ve gotten from ACM for your education efforts.
Impagliazzo:
Yes. I got a few from them. I don’t remember all of them. One was from SIGCSE, the Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education. I’m one of their recipients of contributions to computing. Then that’s also on my signature.
Cohen:
I guess I have ACM Distinguished Educator.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, the ACM Distinguished Educator.
Cohen:
Right. ACM SIGCSE Lifetime Service Award. This was a while back Contributions to NYSMATYC, the Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, right.
Cohen:
A Roger Bacon Scientific Honor Society from St. John’s. I don’t know if we said CSAB Fellow. We said the IEEE. We said the IEEE Life Member. It seems like you’ve been recognized. That was good to hear.
Impagliazzo:
I got enough rewards.
Cohen:
Enough awards. But I do see, John, you’re still actively involved. You just had an article that came out in a recent Communications of the ACM in December 2022. I know from your vita you shared that you’re still doing some grant work writing, doing things. Do you want to talk a little bit about some of those directions you’re going?
Impagliazzo:
Yes, well, I don’t seek them out. People seek me. One of the things that I was involved with, well, we have to go back twenty years. I don’t know if you want to do that.
Cohen:
That’s fine.
Impagliazzo:
All right. Some of the things I got involved with had much to do with curriculum, so this goes back. I was always active, as you remember from ACM, on the Accreditation Committee, which always brought me back to the curriculum of computing. The ACM and the IEEE produced a document in 2001 in which I was not a direct member of the committee, but it talked about curriculum in computing. It’s no longer CS; it has to do with many other areas. The different areas even spelled out what some of the other areas were. One was, of course, computer science, but the others were computer engineering and information systems. What were the other two? Information technology. I missed one. I guess I got them all. All these different things started emerging. I got involved with computer engineering work, which was published in 2004. That is the Curriculum CE 2004. Computer Engineering 2004. Right? But from 1980-something to maybe 2017, 2018, I was always involved with the ACM Education Board and the Education Committee. Either I was a member of it or a committee director of something connected with it. For thirty years, I was involved with AMC education. They finally sent me a Dear John Letter.
Cohen:
A Dear John Letter?
Impagliazzo:
The Dear John letter said that you are no longer a part… Of course, I had to go to the final meeting, which I did. I said thank you for the Dear John Letter; I accept it. It’s time to move on and do things. During the time, from 2004 to today, I was still involved with a lot of curriculum stuff, so I ended up leading the CE 2016 effort. That’s Computer Engineering 2016. Now people are asking me to talk about the next curriculum update because it’s getting old.
I don’t know if I should be involved with that. I’ll at least get it started if they ask me.
The other thing was the IT 2017 Report: Information Technology. That was important because it was the landmark publication for instilling competency in computing education. Before that, it was just learning outcomes. Topics. Topics and learning outcomes which we threw out. We threw it in the garbage. There were no more learning outcomes in that document.
That led to another significant committee, the CC 2020 Committee, Computing Curricula 2020. That came out. That was a joint effort led mainly by ACM. IEEE had some part of it. The Computer Society could be more forthcoming if they have to invest money into anything. I kind of know why because they have financial problems. But the other thing is that the Computer Society doesn’t, how do you say it, throw its all to try to make something happen. ACM is the leader. But we share. ACM and IEEE are like brothers and sisters. We share things. However, this CC 2020 document is very noticeable worldwide. Now there are hundreds of articles that have been published related to it. Twenty-one computing societies from all over the world have endorsed it. It is not just something that just ACM or IEEE put out. It is a broad-based document. I was one of the principal coauthors of that. Many of the things that appear in it for developing competencies are related to that report. It’s still working. I mean, it’s still functioning. I have to attend a CC 2020 meeting in Toronto in three weeks. It’s still bubbling. So that’s the one thing that’s very much on the horizon. Still on the horizon. But that emerged a lot because of my involvement with China. Should we go down that path?
Cohen:
We can. I’m also looking at the time.
Impagliazzo:
Yes.
Cohen:
We’re sort of at a little before 1:00. Do we want to take a short break? How are you doing?
Impagliazzo:
I’m fine. We could take five, ten minutes if you want.
Cohen:
All right, we’ll take five.
Impagliazzo:
Take five minutes. I’ll stay here.
Cohen:
I’m going to pause.
[Break taken].
I’ve resumed recording.
Impagliazzo:
Okay.
China
Cohen:
I think before our little break, we were talking a little bit about China. You were going to talk about.
Impagliazzo:
The CE 2016 report came out in 2016. Since I was the chair of that committee, I wanted to make it as international as possible. Through connections with the ACM Education Board, they also had an Education Council at that time. I had made connections with people on that Board who were related to China. It was important to make sure that this report had a Chinese flavor to it. Much of that reason has to do with the fact that the U.S. produces, I think, something like 50,000 engineers computing people every year, baccalaureate. But China produces 100,000 to 150,000 every year. To not have their influence on this international document would be a mistake. I made sure that two people on the CE 2016 project were from China. One person was from Tsinghua University, like the MIT of China or the Cal Tech of China. The other is the Peking University, the Harvard, or Stanford of China. I had two representatives there. Their involvement, plus other connections, brought me to China. I forgot when I first went, but it probably was 2014 or some time in that area. There was a major conference in Chengdu. Chengdu is a city. You have to understand that the cities in China are small if they are under fifteen million people. They are large if they are over that.
Cohen:
Wow, they’re compact, right?
Impagliazzo:
No, not necessarily.
Cohen:
Oh, okay.
Impagliazzo:
Beijing and Shanghai are very compact. Yes. But I mean in the sense that any other city but Beijing has 24 million people. Shanghai has twenty-something million people. These are large cities. This trip to Chengdu was not just a visit, but it was a group of people who were the top people from the major universities throughout China who came there. I conducted a two-day workshop with them. One was on the computer engineering curriculum that I was piloting. The other one was the one I was working on, the IT 2017 curriculum. We spent six to seven hours every day for the two days speaking about curriculum: how it is in China and how it could be changed. Fortunately, all the people there knew some English. Most academicians in China understand English because they associate with it. Unbeknownst to me, one of the people in this audience was the chief of all education throughout China. I didn’t know. I mean, my friend told me this person is important. But I didn’t know who he was. Then, of course, in the end, he gave his comments and criticized some of the things we were saying. It turns out that we became, I would say, friends in the sense that he knows me; I know him.
They’ve asked me several times to go back to China for different things. I did. One of the things that occurs there is the ACM Turing Conference. Alan Turing is the inventor of the theoretical computer, so they acknowledge Turing every year they have this conference. I’ve been to a couple of them. At one, I was a keynote speaker. You have to imagine when you get up in front of a stage there are 2,000 or 3,000 people in the audience, it makes one take pause, you know?
Cohen:
Right. Do they broadcast it as well John? Can people log on?
Impagliazzo:
Yes, they have automatic translators for those who didn’t understand. Yes.
Cohen:
Right. But I mean could people be online as well, another bunch of people?
Impagliazzo:
I was unaware that people were online, but they could be because that’s common there.
Everybody can listen. These related events brought me to China several times, maybe six times over a few years. At least once a year, I’d be there for one conference. Sometimes twice a year because they keep inviting me. One of them they had, they invited me to, it had to do with the new curriculum, a computing curricula for China. They wanted my opinion, so I gave a keynote talk on that, which was well received. They asked me to write an article for their magazine, which I guess is similar to IEEE Computer Magazine. I wrote it, and it was published in Chinese. I heard that the Minister of Education happened to read the article I wrote and was pleased. Don’t ask me what that means. If I go there again, who knows what will happen?
Cohen:
I know.
Impagliazzo:
They did invite me. They have these special projects. I was supposed to go there at the end of January of 2000. They have these special projects to mainstream and accelerate computing education. One of these was the Blue Book, the Chinese Blue Book. The Chinese Blue Book is like the Chinese Bible for competency in education: we don’t memorize things; we have to understand what we’re doing. We have to know the people we’re working with. For this Blue Book project, I have the book downstairs, but it’s in Chinese, so I can’t read it. In the CC 2020 report, I gave a summary of that Blue Book. I think it’s Appendix I for the CC 2020. You can get the CC 2020 report from the ACM site.
Cohen:
Do you want…?
Impagliazzo:
There are a lot of connections between me and the people of China. I didn’t finish my story. I was supposed to go there in January, the end of January of 2020. But as you imagine, they cancelled the meeting because of COVID. Since then, I haven’t heard anything else going on with the project. But they wanted me there. They wanted me there. It was a meeting of just twenty people, including the head of computing education in China and nineteen others, who were trying to formulate the vision for computing education in China for the next ten years. Still, I don’t know what happened with that. I didn’t follow up.
Cohen:
Did you have to deal with -- I know curriculum is one issue, but what about the stuff concerning what they’re publishing or not publishing? Is that part of this stuff, or is it just curriculum issues?
Impagliazzo:
No, mine was just the curriculum side. I know there are things about there were new rules about publishing in China.
Cohen:
Right.
Impagliazzo:
IEEE has connections with those agreements. Other than that, I didn’t get involved. I stay away from the politics and all that. I deal with the professionals that I’m dealing with. We don’t get involved with the new rules stuff because that’s not the reason I was there.
Cohen:
Right. When you were talking a little bit earlier about going from knowledge-based to competency-based education and, yes, I know there’s a big move for that, but you were talking about doing away with some of the learning outcomes instead dealing with the competencies. How is that going to impact ABET because ABET deals mostly with learning outcomes?
Impagliazzo:
Yes, but it just has those few learning outcomes. Actually, it would enhance it. ABET has, I don’t want to go off on a tangent, but ABET has not been truthful in its approach to what it does. Because it talks about these learning student outcomes, they call them.
Cohen:
Outcomes, right?
Impagliazzo:
But they must include knowledge, skills, attitudes, or behaviors. I’ve never been on an ABET visit, and I’ve been on many, where anyone ever discussed skills, let alone attributes such as dispositions. ABET has really faltered. They pretend to be competent with having knowledge skills: dispositions as we call them, but they don’t enforce them. As long as you have the knowledge piece, for ABET, it’s…
Cohen:
All right, all right. Yes, so we won’t go down that path.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, that’s a different path.
Cohen:
Yes, that’s fine. I want to also go back to two other points that I want to have you think a little bit about. One is you spent a lot of your career obviously teaching at Hofstra. Anything you want to talk about? You were there for many years at Hofstra. I know its reputation even changed during those years as well. It became better known. How did you see the computer science department growing there? What are good things, whatever, that you’d want to share?
Impagliazzo:
In general, when I became chair, I had a big uphill battle because the administration could not understand why we needed anything but a simple computer. Even if it was a green screen: we had green screens then. We even had punch cards. This was the 1980s. I had to work hard to convince the administration that you needed more than just a simple computer if you wanted to do anything scientific, like graphics and things of that sort. Networks. They didn’t quite understand it. We would always make jokes. It’s like teaching somebody to play the violin, but you don’t have a violin. You just have some kind of broomstick. Eventually, that got changed, thank God, but not in my time. It was very hard.
Plus, the enrollments, for some reason, collapsed when I was chair. When I was chair, I had quite a few students. We had like 700 majors in undergraduate and about 120 graduate students, which was good. But for some reason, the industry changed. Computing always goes through these cycles of up and down. I did what I could do, and it worked out fine. Then from there, I became the head of the graduate program. We kept motivating that. We still have a pretty good – at Hofstra, I actually created the first online degree in computer science. I don’t think anybody did it before. This was like 2003 or so. You can get a master’s degree in computer science, and you don’t have to be on campus at all. I was the leader of that. Now Georgia Tech has a sort of a fancy, I guess, successful online master’s degree in computer science, but I think we were the first ones to do that back in the early 2000s. So that was good. Of course, preparation has to be very different.
Cohen:
Right.
Impagliazzo:
We didn’t have the bandwidth to do it. We didn’t have Zoom or anything like that, so you had to do it through lectures, structured lectures, and have controlled exams, and things of that sort. It was very complicated, but it worked. I’m sure you’re familiar with that at Nova
Cohen:
Yes, I was going to say at Nova Southeastern University, we had something called the ECR, the Electronic Classroom, so people could raise their hands, but it was text-based.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, that’s right.
Cohen:
We certainly didn’t have the bandwidth for video. Students had to have certain minimum computer equipment to even run that stuff. So, yes, it was a different thing. Did you end up supervising Ph.D. students or were you mostly teaching? Any Ph.D. programs?
Impagliazzo:
No. We didn’t have Ph.D. students at Hofstra, just master’s degree students.
IEEE Global Museum project
Cohen:
Let’s talk a little bit about the Global Museum. I’ll let you start. What do you want to say about it? I know it’s something you’re working on.
Impagliazzo:
Well, yes. This goes back twenty years. When I was on the IEEE History Committee in the early 2000s, there was always talk about having a museum for history, an IEEE museum. The problem is always money: where will you get the money to build a museum? First, you have to buy or build a building. Then where would you put this building? One of the ideas was to have it in Piscataway, [New Jersey], opposite the IEEE headquarters, but who in the world is going to go to Piscataway to a museum? The idea was to put the IEEE History Center in the museum or maybe other things. I mean, who’s going to take a train from someplace, Philadelphia, New York, and go all the way to Piscataway to see a museum? So that idea, even if we had the money, the idea would fall through. We started toying around back then about maybe having a moving museum of some sort, but the idea never matured. It faltered. Then I was off the committee, so nobody picked it up. In recent times in the last five years, the topic came up again. We thought, why should we not have a museum within a museum for one case? Or a museum within a library. Or a museum in a train station. When people see this thing, they might look at it for a short spell, but at least they’ll see it. The idea was to have IEEE be recognized throughout the world. At one of the IEEE History Committee meetings, I became the chair of this subcommittee of the History Committee to come up with a plan for this global museum. The people were very enthusiastic about it at the time. The question is how should we do this, and where are we going to get the money? This is around 2018 now, 2019. Lisa Nocks became involved. The IEEE History Committee approved it first of all, then Lisa got involved. We started talking about not only the project that I sponsored, which is the IEEE History Showcase Project that Mary Ann [Hellrigel] is very familiar with the idea is to have some elements of history in every IEEE office around the world. But the global thing would be a public version of that. It would involve having artifacts, whatever, even electronic history, to be at different areas in each of the ten regions of IEEE. From that point of view, a global history project got started. The Life Member Committee funded it a couple of times, but it never really got started. Even the Board of IEEE knows about it, but COVID did a number on it. It was supposed to launch but got sacked for about two or three years. Fortunately, it is now gaining real interest. We had the fiftieth celebration of the IEEE Foundation in February in New York. We had what I believe will be the first exhibit for the Global Museum, which is the Edwin Armstrong Exhibit. It was very nicely done at the Sheraton Hotel in New York. Now that’s moving to 3 Park Avenue, the headquarters for IEEE in New York. It’s going to stay there a few months, then from there, I think it’s going someplace else, probably Texas, where our colleague Scott Atkinson is very involved in history in San Antonio. As I understand it… were you at that IEEE History Committee meeting, Maxine?
Cohen:
No. Oh.
Impagliazzo:
Did you go to San Antonio back in 2019?
Cohen:
I went to San Antonio way back when, a few years ago, before COVID.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, right before that, we had our meeting with Scott [T. Scott Atkinson].
Cohen:
Right. We went to that history (museum).
Impagliazzo:
Yes, that was good. As far as I know, it’s either going to be there, or they bought or sold that and opened a new, bigger history complex. I think it might go there. I don’t know. It’s up to the people who were running this.
Cohen:
Is there going to be any virtual link to this? I mean, can you see it online, or do you have to go there?
Impagliazzo:
Well, there should be. There should be a virtual one for every one of them. I don’t know how they’re going to do it. But it would be a shame if we had a beautiful exhibit that only people in San Antonio could see. Of course, if you want to see it live, you’ve got to go there.
Cohen:
Because so many museums might have done something online now, so yes.
Impagliazzo:
Yes. In fact, I had an NSF grant about computing history. I need to update that website, but it had everything that was obviously virtual. All history museums can have a virtual component as well as the physical one. My answer would be yes, a qualified yes; the IEEE History Center has to do that.
Cohen:
All right.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, it would be a shame if we had all these exhibits and only a few people could see them.
Cohen:
Yes.
Impagliazzo:
If you want to see the real thing, the idea of the Global History Museum is that the artifact, or whatever the display is, will be there for approximately one year. Then it would shift out. Then a new thing will come in. These museums or these sub-museums, let’s call them sub-museums, will accommodate the display of things for a period, then they get turned over, and a new display happens. This will occur around the world. This history museum, the Global History Exhibit, will be in San Antonio, which is Region 5. It might get moved to Canada to Region 7. Then something else would go to San Antonio. Until every region in the world has at least one place. Then many of them will have multiple places. That’s the idea. It will be a long-term project, obviously. I hope the IEEE History Center and the History Committee of IEEE will follow through on what I think would be something pretty great.
Cohen:
No, no, that sounds good. You’re right.
Impagliazzo:
That’s the dream that’s almost coming true.
Cohen:
Well, I mean, I think, too, COVID really put a damper on that.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, that was just an unexpected problem.
Cohen:
There was a lot of momentum with that happening, and COVID put a damper on it. Then Lisa Nocks passed away, and she was one of the advocates. Yes, things happened. I think we’re coming a little bit to the end here of what we’re talking about. I want to make sure that we have covered some of the stuff that you want to make sure (to cover). Is there anything from your history that you want to make sure we talk about that we haven’t touched upon?
"The Legacy of John von Neumann"
Impagliazzo:
Yes. There’s one. This one thing that really was major. It’s only a one-liner in my CV, but it was really major. This happened in 1988. A very good friend of mine, Marshall Stone, was a mathematician at the University of Chicago. He built the mathematics department there to be one of the best in the world. He was a good friend of mine. I was actually writing his mathematical biography, but then he passed on along the way. Marshall and I thought it was important to honor John von Neumann. John von Neumann is sometimes considered the father of computing. We won’t get into that debate.
Cohen:
Certainly, the architecture behind it. Yes.
Impagliazzo:
Yes. He was certainly the one thing, so it was important to do a conference in his honor. I ended up doing it. It should have been done at Princeton at the Institute of Advanced Studies, IAS. I tried to get it done there, but nobody wanted to do it. We ended up doing it at Hofstra. The conference was a week-long event from Sunday night through Friday. It involved many people, including Nobel Prize winners and others who were well known in the areas that John Von Neumann was involved with. I put together this event which was a tremendous amount of work. I had the book. I happen to have the book here. It’s called; I don’t know if you can see it.
Cohen:
Oh, The Legacy.
Impagliazzo:
It’s The Legacy of John von Neumann. Some of the people involved -- I had to really work hard at this, but some of the people, like I said, were well-known in their area. For example, I’ll give you one, a Hungarian mathematician scientist, Eugene Wigner, who was a Nobel Prize winner. He was one of the speakers. I had to pick up Edward Teller, the father of the atomic bomb, at the airport.
I brought together the Von Neumann family, including his brother Nicholas and his daughter Marina who was well known. Marina was well known at that time. She was Vice President of General Motors. Now she works, but she’s retired from the University of Michigan. Many, many people were involved. They came from all over the world. Many of them from the States but from Japan, from all over. It’s to honor John von Neumann. This was a spectacular event. The people who were there were inventors or creators of new mathematics and all kinds of things. All the areas that von Neumann was involved with. One person who was there who was a youngster at the time was Aspray, Bill Asbury. Do you know Bill?
Cohen:
No.
Impagliazzo:
He’s a historian, a history of computing person, but he sometimes goes to computing events like SIGCSE and other things.
It was a great achievement to put all of this together into one volume: this one volume of all the people who have given a part of their life to John von Neumann. I mean, we had von Neumann, his family. We had so many of his students. They came. There were 150 people maybe attended that came from all walks of life and were all connected with von Neumann in one way or another. It was great to see all these people together and trying to honor von Neumann, which happened. The American Mathematical Society published the book. I was the editor of it. It’s another notch in the legacy of doing computing history. It probably was the foundation to make me continue thinking about history because to be with these people, some of whom I taught their work in my computing classes, here they are with me. It’s just, you know? Like John Conway in the Game of Life, things of that sort.
I think that was a major accomplishment. No, a major undertaking. I was hoping someone else would have done it. How do you say it? “If you don’t do it sometimes, it won’t get done.” I just threw my hat in the rink, said, chop it off, so it’s one of those things.
Cohen:
Right. Yes, I think I read it in relation to something else, maybe a book I was reviewing for the Middleton Award. I didn’t know much about his life, so it was very interesting, but I don’t remember the title of the book I read.
Impagliazzo:
Yes. On a personal note, everybody tries to do the computing side of von Neumann, but von Neumann was also the creator of the economic theories people use. Some of these things I eventually want to write a paper on. I gave a talk about it. It was in 2003, so it was on the 100th anniversary of von Neumann’s birth. I gave it at the Schrodinger Institute in Berlin. It was the whole treatise on economic developments, not the mathematics of the economic developments of John von Neumann. Then somehow, I lost all my notes on that. I had all kinds of notes, references, et cetera.
Cohen:
Oh.
Impagliazzo:
I gave the talk. Everybody loved the talk because it was totally different from what you would expect about von Neumann. But if I ever find the materials, I will write a paper on it.
Cohen:
It was recent enough that it must be somewhere on a computer or stored.
Impagliazzo:
Maybe it’s on a floppy disk someplace.
Cohen:
A floppy disk, right?
Impagliazzo:
I’m cleaning my office. I have hundreds of these floppy disks; I don’t know which one to look for.
Cohen:
I know. I know. No, it’s difficult. It’s easier to accumulate than to try to find it.
Impagliazzo:
But just one extra note about this. I did an extensive search of the documents for this conference, the von Neumann conference. I spent several days at the Library of Congress in Washington digging up everything I could find on von Neumann. Of course, they let me [look] at the material. I could make copies of things, but I couldn’t take the originals, of course.
I found all kinds of things about von Neumann. I even found his electric bills. It’s fascinating when you go in and do a search like this. You don’t know what you’re going to find. Documents about how he double-crossed Oppenheimer for the position of the Atomic Energy Commission. All kinds of things. It was phenomenal. I spent my time there because I thought it was important to do. I have all these materials someplace in my house. I gave the originals of what I had to the Hungarian von Neumann Museum in Budapest. All my material is there. It’s been on exhibit for ten, fifteen years. If I find it, I’d like to donate it to the IEEE History Center if they’ll take it. But I don’t know if they want to take any of this stuff. If not, I’ll have to look for a home for it because if somebody wants to do the research on von Neumann, at least from the material I have, they would at least have a head start.
Cohen:
Yes. I guess for all that, Mary Ann [Hellrigel] could possibly answer that offline. But that does bring up a good question. As a professor, retiring, you have so much information you’ve collected: books, notes, et cetera. Is there any repository you could do at Hofstra where you could give your stuff somebody will store it or…?
Impagliazzo:
I supposed there is, but I don’t think they care. I don’t see anybody at Hofstra who would care. I would hope IEEE would care. If not, maybe I’ll give it to the Computer History Museum, but it’s not only about computing. I’m close to the Computer History Museum in California because I’ve been with them before they even opened. They used to be in Boston or the Boston area.
Cohen:
Right, I know they were in Boston. I went to a talk with a woman that headed it up, she spoke, and I was very impressed.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, it’s a wonderful place. I mean, it’s like a museum of museums. It takes hours to go through a museum.
Cohen:
To go through?
Impagliazzo:
Yes.
Reflections, advice, closing remarks
Cohen:
Yes. Wow. All right. I guess looking back at stuff like that, are there any things that if you could go back that you would change, anything you would change, you would want to do differently?
Impagliazzo:
Oh, take that position at the St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra as the second oboist.
Cohen:
Your life would have been very different.
Impagliazzo:
Totally different
Cohen:
Scores of music sitting around in your files.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, I don’t know. I guess life is life, and you do what you can do at the time. What makes me happy is that people can benefit from some of the things I do: students and professionals; if they care, that’s fine. It’s like the history projects. Like with IEEE. The History Showcase Project that’s not for the public. The only people who will see this are those who work for IEEE or volunteer for IEEE, so it’s a very limited audience. But the idea is that it might inspire someone else to do something similar or different. Gee, look what John did. So, gee, I wonder if I can do something similar? They may have their own idea about doing it. That’s where I come from then. Of course, the Global History Museum is on a grandiose scale, but that’s going to take decades to populate and do it, for example, with the histories and the museum. With my connections with Russia, I already had commitments from three museums in Russia to give some space to IEEE. We’re asking for 200 or 330 square feet; it’s not a lot. It’s as big as a bedroom in area. Do you have a corner where you can put this stuff?
They were all very excited. One was a significant museum in Moscow, the Polytechnic Museum, which is the number one museum for technology. They had lots of connections with IEEE.
Cohen:
Oh, interesting.
Impagliazzo:
When I was there, there were all these awards from IEEE and things like that, so it’s very connected. I’m sure they would do something. You just have to approach them. Partner with them. There are ways to do this. There were two museums in Moscow and one in St. Petersburg that would have welcomed an exhibition, but COVID hit, and nothing happened.
Cohen:
Right. Well, maybe, you know…
Impagliazzo:
Yes, next year or whatever.
Cohen:
You had a first step with the IEEE Foundation with the stuff happening there and then it’s going to move to Park Avenue, you said, so maybe then things will start happening again.
Impagliazzo:
Yes. Oh, we’ll see.
Cohen:
Although now, with Russia, I don’t know.
Impagliazzo:
I know.
Cohen:
What with the Russian war?
Impagliazzo:
Yes.
Cohen:
Yes, we’re not going to go into political issues.
Impagliazzo:
We can’t go there [to Russia] now because of the situation. I can’t even go there if I want to. I had a visa that I could have gone, but I didn’t. Good point.
Cohen:
No, those things are very different.
Impagliazzo:
We’ll see what happens in a few years.
Cohen:
All right.
Impagliazzo:
By the way, a little thing about Qatar. I went there. One of the interesting things there is to see how the country has transformed over a short period. The country only came into existence, I believe it was around 1980 or something like that, so it’s very young. One of the things I did there was I was hired there, as you know, as an endowed chair. I went there. One of the things I accomplished there was to help develop the world’s first global center for the disabled. It was an assistive technology center. The idea was to use computers to help the handicapped. The government, through its various industries, put up quite a bit of money. They were going to put up $100 million to make this work. One of the ideas was my idea, so I developed the first blueprint, the first document to get this going to establish this. I never wanted to be the director of it or anything because my affiliation was with the university.
Cohen:
You were still on leave? You were on a sabbatical from Hofstra?
Impagliazzo:
No, I retired from Hofstra.
Cohen:
You retired, okay.
Impagliazzo:
It was time. I took this job. This center came about because I was working with the Minister of Telecommunications. You wouldn’t believe this, but in Qatar, the university's president was a woman, the provost was a woman, and the college's dean was a woman. The head of telecommunications for the country was a woman. You wouldn’t have ever thought that. They’re the way it is there. We, together, formulated this. Here, it’s just a technology center called Mada, which in Arabic means a Visionary Horizon. You can look it up: the Mada Center. I don’t know what’s become of it now. The early dreams of doing so much good, which we did because people could hear and quadriplegics could now use computers. They couldn’t do that before. People who were deaf could hear. I mean some -- you might think that --
Cohen:
You had a bunch of different disabilities you were dealing with.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, yes, yes. You know, even vision, et cetera. If there was a way to make computers, how do you say, to use computers to improve people’s lives, all right, that was one of the achievements that took place there. It may be just a line on a resume, but you know its impact on thousands of people. Then many countries started adopting the same thing. They said, well, let’s duplicate what you created in Qatar, so they did. Other countries would say, okay, how can we get started so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel again. Then I left, so I don’t know what happened to it. It was one of the other achievements that one thinks about when you do these professional things. One thing leads to another and leads to another.
Cohen:
Yes. What kinds of things would you advise a young person wanting to go into the computer field? Wanting to go into this field now. Is there anything you would want to advise them or direction for them to take?
Impagliazzo:
Oh. I would probably be old fashioned -- say study. Do as much mathematics and science as possible because the computing world is changing crazy. I believe we’re still in an infancy. We haven’t seen anything with computers yet. We now have chatbots that can write poems. For some of them, you would never know if it was real or not. We have this big issue that’s happening within IEEE about when you write an article, and you claim this is mine.
If any part of it was done by a chatbot, you can’t say yes; you have to say no. If you say no, IEEE will not publish it because they will --
Cohen:
Inactivate the copyright, yes.
Impagliazzo:
Yes. We have this discussion within the SSIT [IEEE Society on the Social Implications of Technology]. Now I’m sure it’s going to be a big thing within the publications area of IEEE and other publishers. I mean, how do you know who wrote what anymore? I could write an article on potatoes in Ireland, okay? It might turn out to be good. Someone might publish it. Then, of course, I didn’t write a word of it. It’s a very tricky time. My point is that I think the more math [and] science they study, the better. I think languages will disappear. Things will just be amalgamated.
Cohen:
Languages? Like computer languages or languages?
Impagliazzo:
Computer languages. Yes. That will no longer be a major because the dream of software engineering was to get everything modularized, so all you have to do is plug and chug. Things should work harmoniously together. It’s not how many languages, how many programming languages you know, or anything like that. It’s more if you can figure out things of the future logically—the inventiveness. I don’t know what they should study. I think they need to study the basics of computing. I would love to say the history of computing so they can remember how things got to where they are. Of course, the hot stuff today is AI. Tomorrow, who knows what it will be?
Cohen:
Right. I was going over your vita looking at things. One of the things that you were involved with is the Dozenal Society [of America], is that the right way to pronounce it?
Impagliazzo:
Yes, it’s Dozenal.
Cohen:
Dozenal, right, right, which was the Dewey Decimal System based twelve. I did chuckle as I was reading that because I haven’t thought about that in such a long time.
Impagliazzo:
Yes.
Cohen:
That really goes way back teaching Octal Hexadecimal, Binary.
Impagliazzo:
Yes. Yes, the reason for that, well, it used to be based at Nassau Community College. That’s where it got created. They used to have conferences each year, but now since COVID, they don’t do that anymore. They’re trying to get back to it, but some of the work people do there is in number theory because the reason for twelve is its factorability. There are so many ways you can – That is why numbers on the telephone are in twelve. Eggs are in dozens. We have one dozen months in a year. There’s a reason, a logical reason for that.
Cohen:
Twenty-four hours in a day.
Impagliazzo:
Twenty-four hours in a day.
Cohen:
Which is a multiple of twelve.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, yes. You can think of so many things that are so natural in nature that have this. That’s why they don’t just promote 12. They use that as sort of an excuse, but they use it to think outside of base 10. You know, the Egyptians and the Babylonians thought in base 60. It was in everything they did. The year was 360 days. Then they used to have their leap year with an extra few days for fun. There’s much history that goes back thousands of years on the 12. They promote that to have people think beyond base 10.
Cohen:
Yes.
Impagliazzo:
Yes. I’m involved with them. I’m involved with that a little, but I don’t do much.
Cohen:
Yes. Do you think you’ve achieved some of your dreams? I mean, is this where you thought you would be at this stage in life?
Impagliazzo:
Oh my. [Chuckling]
Cohen:
That’s open ended.
Impagliazzo:
I have no idea where I would be in life. I think what I did was fine. I probably could have done things differently, as everyone could have. I think the way of life, the path of life, is where I am. People like it, fine; if they don’t like it, that’s fine, too; however, it works. I don’t have any “I wish I would have done this or that.” Yes, we could have all zigged instead of zagged along the way, but overall, I think it is fine.
Cohen:
It sounds like you’re still going through life because you’re still writing and you’re still talking. I know things sort of slowed down a little with COVID, but are you still up for doing some of the international stuff?
Impagliazzo:
Oh, yes, sure. I was in Sweden in October. I’m still a little bit hesitant about flying because of COVID stuff. I don’t know. If I have to go on a plane and go somewhere, I’ll go, but I don’t jump at the opportunity to go as I used to. Maybe I need to think twice. At my age, I have to be careful.
Cohen:
I know. I’m a shade younger than you, but I know what you’re saying. Yes.
Impagliazzo:
Yes. Yes.
Cohen:
Is there anything, John, that I didn’t ask you that you want to add or anything you want to have recorded that you’ve done? You’ve done a lot of things that have really made a difference in people’s lives. It’s great we have this opportunity to talk, but is there anything else that you want to talk about?
Impagliazzo:
No, not really. But you asked about doing more things. Every day I enjoy getting up and knowing I have things to do aside from doing email, maybe working on a grant, writing a paper, or doing something. People always ask me. For example, I’m helping run a conference in Portugal now. It’s the Internet of Everything Conference. We did it last year. I’ll send you a little promo on it. Maybe you want to write a little something about it.
Cohen:
Yes. Yes.
Impagliazzo:
I do these things. It involves working with different people. In Saudi Arabia, they needed help in transforming their universities, so they hired me to give them a blueprint of what they might do. I did it.
Cohen:
Yes, you still have that building philosophy with you have blueprints constructing them. Right. It permeated your life in different ways than you thought.
Impagliazzo:
Yes, I guess so, construction, that is right. Yes. I never went through that, obviously, at that time because it was difficult. Like I said, it was a learning experience to deal with people and financial situations, building homes, and making extensions. It was also arguing: arguing with lawyers and arguing with clients.
Cohen:
Wow.
Impagliazzo:
It all worked out. I decided to get out of it, though, because it was taking too much time. I was not enjoying it anymore. Plus, as I said, the interest rates were crazy. How can you do anything when mortgages were 19 percent? It was crazy, so it was time to leave it. Beyond that, it gave me the experience of dealing with individuals and everything you learn. Sometimes, you have to learn from the School of Hard Knocks. It’s nothing you read in a book.
Cohen:
Right, there’s some stuff that can’t be learned from a book. You have to go out there, and you have to do it. I have on my list here that I should tell you that there is a link to the oral histories that are posted, but I feel like I’m saying it because I need to because you are very much aware of this stuff. You have been involved in it.
Impagliazzo:
Yes.
Cohen:
If something triggered in your head in the conversations and there are other things you want to talk about further, we can set up another time.
Impagliazzo:
Yes.
Cohen:
As Mary Ann [Hellrigel] said, we could go back and add an addendum. I think that’s all I wanted to say.
Impagliazzo:
I have a big question for Mary Ann. Is she live? Are you still here?
Cohen:
I think so.
Hellrigel:
I’m live.
Impagliazzo:
Hi, Mary Ann, how did my friend do?
Hellrigel:
Oh, I’d say she hit a home run, a grand slam.
Impagliazzo:
Oh, a grand slam home run. Good Maxine.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Cohen:
Oh, I wasn’t sure who your friend was. Thank you. I didn’t quite get it.
I don’t know if this will go in the conversation, but I’ll say to edit it out. I’ve known John for a long time. I always enjoy his company and his conversation. I’m glad I had the opportunity to do this. This was wonderful on many different levels.
Impagliazzo:
Maxine, you were wonderful. Very good. Thank you.
Cohen:
Well, thank you. Like I said, it was wonderful.
Impagliazzo:
Keep up the good work.
Cohen:
Thank you.
Hellrigel:
I will say for the transcriber that I am Mary Ann Hellrigel, Institutional Historian and Archivist, as well as Oral History Program Manager at the IEEE History Center. I am joining this interview to make a few brief comments.
Impagliazzo:
I don’t understand what you said, Mary Ann. The voice got garbled.
Cohen:
She identified herself.
Impagliazzo:
Okay.
Hellrigel:
Yes, I work at the IEEE History Center with a variety of responsibilities, primarily as the Institutional Historian and Oral History Program Manager, [and the] consultant on John’s archival collection, too.
Impagliazzo:
Okay.
Hellrigel:
We will talk about your collection of IEEE material.
Impagliazzo:
We’ll talk later , okay?
Hellrigel:
I want to thank both of you. This recording session has been an excellent experiment. Maxine has recorded her oral history with me, and recording John’s oral history is part of her oral history training. This will set her on her way. Our next project will be determined.
Cohen:
That sounds good. No, now that I did this one, I feel a little bit more confident to do another one. It’s just that for John, I knew some stuff. I knew Long Island history, so some of that was easy for me.
Impagliazzo:
That was great.
Hellrigel:
We will ask you later. We will probably fill in the names of your folks, such as your mother and father, as we edit the transcript. At that time, we also double check names and dates.
Impagliazzo:
Oh, sure, sure. Okay. When you do the transcript, leave the blanks so I can just put in the stuff. Copyedit it the way you want.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Impagliazzo:
Since we went on different tangents, you may want to conglomerate some of the discussions.
Hellrigel:
We will see. We will eventually edit the transcripts. We will post it on ETHW. We can add links to your projects and things of that ilk, but right now, thank you. I am going to stop recording. Okay?
Impagliazzo:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Don’t go away.
Impagliazzo:
All right.
Hellrigel:
John, on behalf of the IEEE History Center, I welcome the donation of your books and the proceedings from the Russian computer history conferences. We will do it for you. They were published before I joined the IEEE History Center staff, so I do not know why they are not in our library.
Thank you for recording your oral history.
