Richard de Millo - Early Career

Early Career

His first academic appointment was at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, but in 1976 he returned to Georgia Tech as an Associate Professor of Information and Computer Science, where he established a long-term collaboration with Richard Lipton. This collaboration led to a ground-breaking analysis of formal methods in computer science, the establishment of a new method for software testing, called Program Mutation among other results. In 1977, he collaborated with Lawrence Landweber to create THEORYNET, an early store-and-forward computer network that was the predecessor of NSFNet, a network that was ultimately absorbed by the Internet and managed by NSF until 1989.

From 1981 to 1987 DeMillo was the Director of the Software Test and Evaluation Project for the US Department of Defense (DoD). He is widely credited with developing the DoD’s policy for test and evaluation of software-intensive systems. In 1987, he moved to Purdue University where he was named Professor of Computer Science and Director of The Software Engineering Research Center. In 1989, he became Director of the National Science Foundation Computer and Computation Research Division and presided over the growth of high performance computing and computational science programs. He also held a visiting professorship at the University of Padua in Padua, Italy where he led the formation of a successful post-graduate program in software engineering.

In 1995 he became Vice President and General Manager of Information and Computer Science Research at Bellcore (which later became Telcordia Technologies), leading the invention of new technologies for e-commerce, networking and communications. In 1997, he collaborated with Richard Lipton and Daniel Boneh to create the “Differential Fault Analysis” method of cryptanalysis, leading to a strengthening of existing standards for internet security.

In 2000, DeMillo joined Hewlett-Packard (HP) as vice president and Chief Technology Officer (CTO). While working at HP, he led the company’s introduction of a new processor architecture, a corporate trust and security strategy, and the company’s entry into open source software. He was the public spokesman for HP’s technology and one of the most visible figures in IT. In 2002, RSA Security appointed DeMillo to its Board of Directors, a position he held until 2007 when RSA was acquired by EMC. He remained at HP through the company’s 2002 merger with Compaq computer and was named Vice President for Technology Strategy. He returned to Tech that August to serve as the new dean of the College of Computing.