The roots of Dr. Toms' work on the SRM can be traced to his work at Boeing in the mid 1960's, where, as a young mathematician and engineer, he invented a new method for real time numerical integration of ballistics equations. The results of his work were cited as one of the critical reasons for the award of the B1 Avionics program to Boeing. A graduate of Oregon State University with a doctoral degree in applied mathematics, he left Boeing in the mid 70's to lead the Monterey operations of BDM International for the Armored Combat Vehicle Technology program.

Ralph's work in combat simulation and analysis, combined with his innovative techniques for numerical integration and real time algorithms, continued at GE Space Systems Division through the mid 1980's. At GE Space Systems he was responsible for the management and oversight of several sensitive projects that involved real time simulation development, transportable hardware and software systems, real time algorithms, and high speed graphics.

In 1987 he joined the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he became the development manager for a number of combat simulation projects, including Janus, JCM, JTS, UCCATS, AWS, among others, and was the manager of the Conflict Simulation Laboratory. In addition, between 1987 and 1997 he was the principal investigator for such projects as Janus 2000, while at the same time he authored several papers on high resolution combatsimulation, and developed a number of high speed algorithms. One of these developments lead to his 1995 landmark paper, "An efficient algorithm for geocentric to geodetic coordinate conversion." The paper, and his subsequent publications since then, have generated significant interest in the distributed simulation community. Ralph's innovative techniques and hisground-breaking work, became the heart of the implementation of the SRM libraries.

Through out his career, Ralph has held teaching positions at Oregon State University and at San Jose State University, where he has thought graduate courses in applied mathematics, statistics, queuing theory, and optimization. He has published over 35 papers on simulation, modeling, andefficient algorithms for the representation of coordinate locations.

In 1996 he joined SRI International as a senior technical advisor, and has been involved in a number of national and international projects. At the same time he has continued his outstanding work on the SRM, further refining and honing the internal algorithms that have lead to newer andeven more efficient implementations of the SRM. He is currently advancing the state of the art by developing a more unified underpinning of the SRM concepts, and is also involved in patenting a new technique he recently invented.

His remarkable achievements in the development of the SRM concepts, algorithms, techniques, and terminology have become the corner stone of many applications that depend upon the most basic representation of anything environmental, the location. We are pleased to present the 2002SEDRIS Outstanding Contributions and Achievements Award to Ralph Toms.