2012 DISA Awarded to Dr. Joyce Currie Little

I am pleased to announce that the Association Board of Directors (ABoD) has approved the selection of Joyce Currie Little, Ph.D. CCP as the recipient of the 2012 Distinguished Information Sciences Award (DISA). Association President Bill Fly and I will present the DISA to Dr. Little at the Saturday, April 6th luncheon during the National Computing Conference (NCC) in St. Louis.

Dr. Little is Professor Emerita, Computer and Information Sciences at Towson University in Towson, Maryland. She has been an educator for over fifty years, focusing on software engineering, systems analysis and design, and societal and ethical issues of technology. She is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Little has served the Institute for Certification of Computing Professionals (ICCP) for decades as a Director and President, and was on the Washington DC-based Commission for Professionals in Science and Technology, representing the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She received the ACM SIGCSE Lifetime Service to the Computer Science Education Community in 2006 and was named an EDSIG Fellow in 2011.  See even more biographical information below.

I first met Dr. Little when I participated on her international working group in Kracow, Poland that resulted in the seminal publication "Integrating professionalism and workplace issues into the computing and information technology curriculum” SIGCSE Bulletin 31(4):106-120 (December 1999). Many of the concepts presented in this paper helped form the foundation of AITP's definition of a "business IT professional” in 2008.

When we informed Dr. Little of her award, she exclaimed: "This is such an honor, far beyond anything I've ever been given before, though I am ‘fellow' of several organizations, including the ACM. This one is the greatest!” She went on to say: "I am indeed honored to be selected for the DISA, and even more so as it came during your Presidency when Bill [Fly] was your EVP.”

DISA is AITP's highest award bestowed upon individuals who have made outstanding contributions through distinguished services in the field of information management. Dr. Little joins a distinguished list of previous recipients that includes Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, H. Ross Perot, Max D. Hopper, Dr. Paul M. Pair, Bill Gates, and Dr. Coleman Furr in this prestigious circle of honor. Go to  http://www.aitp.org/?DISA for a complete list of DISA recipients.

Additional Biographical Information for Joyce Currie Little

Dr. Joyce Currie Little, Professor Emerita, Towson University
Dept. of Computer & Information Sciences
Towson University, 8000 York Road, Towson, MD 21252-0001
Email address: jclittle@towson.edu

Joyce Currie Little is Professor Emerita, Computer & Information Sciences, at Towson University, Baltimore, Maryland, where she was the founding department chair in 1984. She teaches their software engineering course for computer science majors, and is the course coordinator and major instructor of the courses in societal impact and ethical use of computers and computing that meet the criteria for ABET accreditation. She was the 2002 Principal Investigator for the CoSMiC Scholars Program, a National Science Foundation $500,000 scholarship program for needy meritorious students in the computational sciences, which was continued for a total of ten years.

Joyce graduated from high school in Pioneer, Louisiana in 1952 and received the B.S. degree in Mathematics Education from Northeast Louisiana State University (now University of Louisiana at Monroe). She completed the M.S. degree in Applied Mathematics at San Diego State University, during several years of employment as a Testing Engineer in the Low Speed Wind Tunnel at Convair Aircraft Corporation in San Diego. She completed a PhD program in Higher Education Administration (for academic computing centers) at the University of Maryland College Park. She was employed at Goucher College as Assistant Manager, Computer Center for several years, and later taught and managed computing facilities for education at the Community College of Baltimore (CCB), now the Baltimore City Community College. She headed several efforts in curriculum development for the Associate Degree level with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and with the Association for Information Technology Professionals (AITP).

Joyce is a professional member of the ACM, the AITP, the IEEE-Computer Society, the Association for Women in Computing (AWC), and the American Association for University Professors (AAUP). She currently serves as an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) representative to the Institute for Certification of Computing Professionals (ICCP). She was an active member of three different professional committees that created or revised the organization's ethics code: the DPMA's Ethics Code and Standards for Good Practice, the ACM Committee to Revise the Code of Ethics, and the IEEE-CS Task Force to create the Code of Ethics for Software Engineers.

Joyce is active in the Hunting Ridge Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD, where she has served as Elder for many years. She is an active member of the Advisory Board of the Joanna Nicolay Melanoma Research Foundation, having lost her son to melanoma in 2005, when he was 32. She has survived her husband John Little, who died in 2001.

Click here for even more biographical information about Joyce Little.

Click here for a list of her publications.

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