Dr. Avizienis was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, and has resided in the USA since 1950. He received the B.S. (1954), M.S. (1955), and the Ph.D. (1960) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois and joined the UCLA Faculty in 1962. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the recipient of the AIAA Information Systems Award (1979), the NASA Exceptional Service Medal (1980), the annual IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award (1985) and the IFIP Silver Core Award (1986). His teaching and research interests are in computer system architecture, digital arithmetic, and fault-tolerant computing, especially software fault tolerance, fault-tolerant distributed system architectures, and design methodology for fault-tolerant systems.