Robert F. Sproull recently retired as Vice President and Director of Oracle Labs, an applied research group that originated at Sun Microsystems. Since undergraduate days, he has been building hardware and software for computer graphics: clipping hardware, an early device-independent graphics package, page description languages, laser printing software, and window systems.
He has also been involved in VLSI design, especially of asynchronous circuits and systems. Before joining Sun Microsystems in 1990 (acquired by Oracle in 2010), he was a principal with Sutherland, Sproull and Associates, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a member of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. He is a coauthor with William Newman of the early text, "Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics."
He is also an author of the book "Logical Effort," which deals with designing fast CMOS circuits. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has served on the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Board and as a technology partner of Advanced Technology Ventures. He is currently a co-chair of the National Research Council's Report Review Committee, a member of the NRC Committee on Science, Engineering, Medicine, and Public Policy (COSEMPUP) and an adjunct professor of computer science at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
