Birnbaum is the Former Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Hewlett-Packard, prior to that he was the Senior Technical Advisor to the Chairman and CEO at HP. He joined HP in 1980 as Founding Director of the Computer Research Center of HP Laboratories in Palo Alto. His personal contributions are in the areas of distributed computer system architecture, real-time data acquisition, analysis and control, and RISC processor 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; honorary doctorate from Technion University of Israel; and the 2000 Weber Prize of the IEEE. He is a member of the board of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, and the Indigo and Veridian Corporations.