Celebrating IT Heroes

Computerworld - This time around, there is a greater poignancy to the theme of our annual Computerworld Honors program: "The Search for New Heroes." The everyday miracles accomplished by IT organizations everywhere - so easy to overlook in this battened-down economy - clearly play a more notable role in the weightier concerns of a changed world.
Tonight in Washington, at a fancy awards ceremony in a beautiful old building, Computerworld will name a handful of winning IT projects and programs, winnowed from 59 international finalists. They cut across a broad swath of industries, from business, manufacturing and medicine to academia, government and science - all of them nominated by the CEOs of leading technology companies. But whether these finalists win and take home a lovely hunk of crystal doesn't matter much, really. What everyone should remember is the innovation, the energy and the creativity behind every one of these IT projects.
Starting on page 26, we've profiled a few of the finalists in this year's Honors program. Just reading the brief descriptions of some of their accomplishments makes your throat choke with emotion and remembrance. Consider, for example, the team of 15 IT managers and engineers from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey who kept traffic flowing - and emergency crews moving - in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. They worked 24/7, slept in their cars and fought back their own grief for 75 colleagues lost in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. They probably never felt like IT heroes. They saw work that needed doing, and so they got it done.
From the other side of the world, we will honor projects that advance our global understanding. Like the technology-based distance learning made possible to 15 sub-Saharan countries through the African Virtual University. Or the Rhinowatch project, the first full-blown census of the rare white rhinoceros, accomplished through pattern recognition of digital images.
On the medical frontier, we'll admire the work of Operation Lindbergh, which has broken new ground in enabling robot-assisted telesurgery across the Atlantic Ocean. Using advanced communications technologies, the actions of a French surgeon based in New York were transmitted to a Strasbourg operating room, then the video image was bounced back to New York in less than a fifth of a second.
In the field of techno-science, we'll highlight the work of astrophysicist Geoffrey Marcy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the way the customized code and algorithms he and a colleague created eventually led to the discovery ofdozens of planets beyond our solar system.
Closer to home, we find our everyday IT heroes behind the technology that built www.icouldbe.org, where hundreds of career mentors and guidance counselors are now available online to counsel at-risk teenagers; or at the U.S. Department of Defense, whose Java-based security project will distribute 4.3 million multifunction smart ID cards to military and support personnel.
Our search for high-tech heroes has been under way since the Computerworld Honors program debuted in 1988. Each year, the technologies have scaled to greater heights and enabled more dazzling displays of the power and promise of IT. But never once have they outpaced the human spirit behind them.