An expert on electronic voting, Barbara Simons was a member of the National Workshop on Internet Voting that was convened at the request of President Clinton and produced a report on Internet voting in 2001.  She was a participant in the Security Peer Review Group for the US Department of Defense’s Internet voting project (SERVE) and co-authored the report that led to the cancellation of SERVE because of security concerns.  Simons also co-chaired the ACM study of statewide databases of registered voters.  She is co-authoring a book on voting machines with Doug Jones.

Simons was president of ACM from July 1998 until June 2000.  She founded ACM’s US Public Policy Committee (USACM) in 1993 and served for many years as the chair or co-chair of USACM.

In 2005 Simons became the first woman to receive the Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award from the College of Engineering of U.C. Berkeley. She is also a Fellow of ACM and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received the Alumnus of the Year Award from the Berkeley Computer Science Department, the Distinguished Service Award from Computing Research Association, the Norbert Wiener Award from Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, the Outstanding Contribution Award from ACM, and the Pioneer Award from EFF. She was selected by C|NET as one of its 26 Internet “Visionaries” and by Open Computing as one of the “Top 100 Women in Computing.” Science Magazine featured her in a special edition on women in science.

Simons is retired from IBM Research.

Guest on Voice of the Voters on April 30, 2008.