Mr. Skall began his employment with NIST in 1978. He is currently the
Chief of the Software and Systems Division (SSD)
of the Information Technology Laboratory of the National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST). His Division develops testing tools
that improve the quality of software in industry and government and
works with major standards organizations like W3C, ANSI, ISO, and OASIS
to help them develop standards. SSD is internationally recognized as
the foremost experts in conformance testing and computer forensics.
Major efforts in the Division include:
- The
development of conformance tests, used by industry, to determine adherence
to the XML family of standards, including XML, DOM, XSLT, XSL-FO,
Schema and Query. These comprehensive test suites are currently used
as the metric for testing all XML processors developed by companies
such as Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, IBM, etc.
- Leading
national efforts in healthcare informatics by developing standards
and tests for HL7, IEEE, and ATA (American Telemedicine Association),
including a web based healthcare standards landscape.
- State-of-the-art
research into more effective means of software testing, resulting
in a breakthrough technology to automatically generate tests from
formal specifications.
- A comprehensive
computer forensics program including the development of the National
Software Reference Library, used by all law enforcement agencies to
examine seized media for evidence, and the Computer Forensics Tool
Testing Program, used to ensure that computer forensics software tools
work according to requirements.
Prior to becoming Division Chief in 1996, Mr. Skall was the Manager
of the Visualization and Virtual Reality Group within the Computer Systems
Laboratory (CSL) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST). This group conducted research and developed metrics to help
the private sector and the Federal government utilize computer graphics
and virtual reality technologies to access, manipulate and exchange
complex visual information. From 1967 to 1978, Mr. Skall was manager
of the CAD Branch within David Taylor Research and Development Center.
Mr. Skall was a charter member and Vice-Chairman, of Accredited Standards
Committee X3H3 (Computer Graphics) and is the founder and past Chairman
of X3H3.4 (Conformance and Language Bindings) and X3H3.7 (Validation,
Testing and Registration). Mr. Skall also served as the Rapporteur of
the Validation, Testing and Registration Task Group for ISO IEC/JTC1/SC24/WG5.
For his work in this area, Mr. Skall received the prestigious Committee
Management Award from Accredited Standards Committee X3.
Mr. Skall has served on the Board of Directors of the National Computer
Graphics Association as an elected member in charge of standards and
integration. Mr. Skall is the author of numerous publications including
an invited paper for the Encyclopedia of Software Engineering, entitled
“Software Validation”, and an article on NIST's role in
graphics standards for a special issue of IEEE Computer Graphics and
Applications, devoted to graphics standards. He is also the editor of
a book published by Springer Verlag, entitled "CGM IN THE REAL WORLD".
Mr.
Skall received a BS in Mathematics from Brooklyn College in 1967, an
MS in Information Systems Technology from George Washington University
in 1977 and a JD from Northern Virginia Law School in 1997.
