David J. Farber

David Jack Farber (April 17, 1934 – February 7, 2026) was an American professor of computer science, noted for his major contributions to programming languages and computer networking and was a distinguished professor and co-director of Cyber Civilization Research Center at Keio University in Japan. Farber was widely known as a mentor who maintained a global list of contacts in the high technology field, often connecting people with problems that needed solving.

Life and career Farber was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, on April 17, 1934. From an early age, encouraged by his father, Farber tinkered with electronics, building radio sets from kits. He graduated from the Stevens Institute of Technology with a B.E. degree in electrical engineering in 1956 and a M.S. degree in mathematics in 1961. He then began an 11-year career at Bell Laboratories, where he helped design the first electronic switching system (ESS-1) and the SNOBOL programming languages. He subsequently held industry positions at the Rand Corporation and Scientific Data Systems, followed by academic positions at the University of California, Irvine, the University of Delaware, and Carnegie Mellon University. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in engineering from the Stevens Institute in 1999. In 2018, he moved to Japan to become Distinguished Professor at Keio University and Co-Director of the Keio Cyber Civilization Research Center (CCRC).

He was a founding editor of ICANNWatch. He served on the board of advisers of Context Relevant and The Liquid Information Company. He was one of the founding board members of the Internet Systems Consortium, and had served on that board since 1994.

Farber died in Tokyo from heart failure on February 7, 2026, at the age of 91. At the time of his death, Farber was employed as a professor at Keio University. mailing list called Interesting-People. In 2012, in memory of his son, he established the Joseph M. Farber prize at the Stevens Institute of Technology , which recognizes a graduating senior majoring in one of the disciplines of the College of Arts and Letters who displays a keen interest in and concern for civil liberties and their importance in preserving and protecting human rights.

On August 3, 2013, Farber was inducted into the Pioneers Circle of the Internet Hall of Fame. He was elected as the AAAS Fellow by the Council of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2018.

Selected publications W. A. Arbaugh, D. J. Farber and J. M. Smith, "A secure and reliable bootstrap architecture," Proceedings. 1997 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Cat. No.97CB36097), Oakland, CA, USA, 1997, pp. 65-71, doi: 10.1109/SECPRI.1997.601317. Shapiro, J. S., Smith, J. M., & Farber, D. J. (1999, December). EROS: a fast capability system. In Proceedings of the seventeenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles (pp. 170-185). Farber, D. J., Griswold, R. E., & Polonsky, I. P. (1964). SNOBOL, a string manipulation language. Journal of the ACM (JACM), 11(1), 21-30. Satyanarayanan, M., Gilbert, B., Toups, M., Tolia, N., Surie, A., O'Hallaron, D. R.... & Lagar-Cavilla, H. A. (2007). Pervasive personal computing in an internet suspend/resume system. IEEE Internet Computing, 11(2), 16-25. Merlin, P. M., & Farber, D. J. (2006). A parallel mechanism for detecting curves in pictures. IEEE Transactions on Computers, 100(1), 96-98.