Birnbaum currently serves as the Special Technical Advisor to the Chairman and CEO of the Hewlett-Packard Company. Prior to that he was the Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Hewlett-Packard; following his retirement in 1999 he served as Chief Scientist and Senior Technical Advisor to the Chairman and CEO of HP. He joined HP in 1980 as Founding Director of the Computer Research Center of HP Laboratories in Palo Alto, after fifteen years at the IBM Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, where he was Director of Computer Sciences. His personal contributions are in the areas of distributed computer system architecture, real-time data acquisition, analysis and control, RISC processor architecture and pervasive computing architecture.. Birnbaum's honors include elected membership in the National Academy of Engineering and the Royal Academy of Engineering, UK; Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE); Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Sterling Fellow, Yale University; honorary doctorate from Technion University of Israel; and the 2000 Weber Prize of the IEEE. He is a member of the board of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.