ACM Awards

Prateek Mittal, Princeton University, is the recipient of the 2023 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for foundational contributions to safeguarding Internet privacy and security using a cross-layer approach. The unifying theme in Mittal’s research is to leverage foundational techniques from network science, comprising graph-theoretical mechanics, data mining, and inferential modeling for tackling privacy and security challenges. Taken together, his contributions are impacting the privacy and integrity of global commerce, financial services, online healthcare, and everyday communications.

Andrew S. Tanenbaum receives the ACM Software System Award for MINIX, which influenced the teaching of Operating Systems principles to multiple generations of students and contributed to the design of widely used operating systems, including Linux. MINIX was a small microkernel-based UNIX operating system for the IBM PC, which was popular at the time. It was roughly 12,000 lines of code, and in addition to the microkernel, included a memory manager, file system and core UNIX utility programs. It became free open-source software in 2000.

Guy E. Blelloch, Carnegie Mellon University; Laxman Dhulipala, University of Maryland; and Julian Shun, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receive the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for contributions to algorithm engineering, including the Ligra, GBBS, and Aspen frameworks which revolutionized large-scale graph processing on shared-memory machines. They have obtained many truly outstanding results in which their provably efficient algorithms running on an inexpensive multi-core shared-memory machine are faster than any prior algorithms, even those running on much bigger and more expensive machines. 

David Blei of Columbia University receives the ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award. Blei is recognized for significant contributions to machine learning, information retrieval, and statistics. His signature accomplishment is in the machine learning area of “topic modeling", which he pioneered in the foundational paper “Latent Dirichlet Allocation” (LDA). The applications of topic modelling can be found throughout the social, physical, and biological sciences, in areas such as medicine, finance, political science, commerce, and the digital humanities.

Nivedita Arora is the recipient of the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for demonstrating wireless and batteryless sensor nodes using novel materials and radio backscatter in her dissertation “Sustainable Interactive Wireless Stickers: From Materials to Devices to Applications.” Honorable Mentions for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award go to Gabriele Farina, whose PhD was earned at Carnegie Mellon University, for his dissertation “Game-Theoretic Decision Making in Imperfect-Information Games”; and William Kuszmaul, whose PhD was earned at MIT, for his dissertation “Randomized Data Structures: New Perspectives and Hidden Surprises.”

ACM named Princeton University's Margaret Martonosi the recipient of the ACM Frances E. Allen Award for Outstanding Mentoring. Martonosi is recognized for outstanding and far-reaching mentoring at Princeton University, in computer architecture, and to the broader computer science community. Martonosi, the Hugh Trumbull Adams ’35 Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, is a leader in the design, modeling, and verification of power efficient computer architecture. She also recently served as the National Science Foundation Assistant Director leading the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering.

Alicia Nicki Washington, Professor, Duke University and Shaundra Daily, Professor, Duke University receive the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for their work towards changing the national computing education system to be more equitable and to combat unjust impacts of computing on society. Washington and Daily have had a critical, wide-reaching impact on educating the broader community through a novel course, a popular training program, and a national alliance.

John M. Abowd, Professor Emeritus, Cornell University, and Chief Scientist, United States Census Bureau (retired), receives the ACM Policy Award for transformative work in modernizing the US Census Bureau’s processing and dissemination of census and survey data, which serves as a model for privacy-aware management of government collected data. Abowd’s work has transformed the government’s capacity to improve the accuracy and availability of vital statistical and data resources, while at the same time, enhancing citizens’ privacy.

Jack W. Davidson, Professor, University of Virginia, receives the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award for leadership in and contributions to ACM’s Publications Program. Davidson served as Co-Chair of the ACM Publications Board from 2010 through 2021 and has been the founding chair of the ACM Digital Library Board since 2021. In those roles, he has led several key efforts of paramount importance to ACM, its membership, and the computing community.

Aidong Zhang, Thomas M. Linville Professor, University of Virginia, receives the ACM Distinguished Service Award for her impactful leadership and lasting service to the broad communities of bioinformatics, computational biology, and data mining. As an ACM member for 29 years, Zhang has devoted tremendous efforts to serving her research community. Beyond ACM, Zhang’s numerous contributions to the field have included being selected by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to be a Program Director managing federal investments in several computing-related areas from 2015-2018.

ACM President Yannis Ioannidis  has recognized Anand Deshpande, Managing Director, Persistent Systems, with the ACM Presidential Award for long-standing contributions to the broader computing community and to ACM. Deshpande has been a major asset of the computing ecosystem of India, having a tangible, technological, economic, and intellectual impact in his country. He has made significant contributions to the local innovation and educational environments through think tanks and professional support foundations, but has also contributed to technology policy issues, advising the Indian government on critical topics.

ACM President Yannis Ioannidis  has recognized M. Tamer Özsu, Professor, University of Waterloo with the ACM Presidential Award for long-standing contributions to the broader computing community and to ACM. Özsu is known for his research work on large-scale distributed data management and his emphasis on system building targeting grand societal challenges. In addition, Özsu has truly dedicated himself to the education of the younger generation, nurturing and inspiring young researchers and practitioners.

ACM has named Keshav Pingali, the W.A. ”Tex” Moncrief Chair of Grid and Distributed Computing at the University of Texas at Austin, as the recipient of the 2023 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award. The Ken Kennedy Award recognizes groundbreaking achievements in parallel and high-performance computing. Pingali is cited for contributions to high-performance parallel computing for irregular algorithms such as graph algorithms. The award will be formally presented to Pingali in November at The International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC23).

ACM has named Maja Matarić, the Chan Soon-Shiong Chair and Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, as the 2024-2025 ACM Athena Lecturer. Matarić is recognized for pioneering the field of socially assistive robotics, including groundbreaking research, evaluation, and technology transfer, and foundational work in multi-robot coordination and human-robot interaction. Matarić is also the founding director of the USC Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center, and a Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind.

ACM and the Computer Science Teachers Association have announced the 2023-2024 recipients of the ACM/CSTA Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing. The award recognizes computer science talent in high school students and comes with a $10,000 prize, which they will receive at CSTA's annual conference in July. The recipients are Shobhit Agarwal, Reedy High School, Frisco, Texas; Franziska Borneff, Hidden Valley High School, Cave Spring, Virginia; Daniel Mathew, Poolesville High School, Poolesville, Maryland; and Kosha Upadhyay, Bellevue High School, Bellevue, Washington 

ACM's A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing," is given to individuals who have contributed lasting and major technical accomplishments to computing. But did you know that more than half of A.M. Turing awardees have been funded by the US National Science Foundation at some point in their careers? Now the NSF has created a website commemorating all A.M. Turing Award recipients, their accomplishments, and their relationships with the Foundation. Please visit the site to learn more.

ACM has named 68 members ACM Fellows for significant contributions in areas including algorithm design, computer graphics, cybersecurity, energy-efficient computing, mobile computing, software analytics, and web search, to name a few. The ACM Fellows program recognizes the top 1% of ACM Members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community.

ACM has named 52 Distinguished Members for outstanding contributions to the field. All 2023 inductees are longstanding ACM members and were selected by their peers for a range of accomplishments that advance computing as a science and a profession. The ACM Distinguished Member program recognizes up to 10 percent of ACM worldwide membership based on professional experience and significant achievements in computing.

An eight-member team drawn from American and Indian institutions was named the winner of the 2023 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for the project, “Large-Scale Materials Modeling at Quantum Accuracy: Ab Initio Simulations of Quasicrystals and Interacting Extended Defects in Metallic Alloys,” which presented a framework that combines the accuracy provided by QMB methods with the efficiency of Density-Functional Theory (DFT) to access larger length scales at quantum accuracy. The award was bestowed during the SC23 conference.

A 19-member research team was awarded the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling for their project, "The Simple Cloud-Resolving E3SM Atmosphere Model Running on the Frontier Exascale System,” proving that by using exascale supercomputers along with a new algorithmic model they have introduced, the longstanding challenge of developing efficient and accurate simulations of deep convective clouds can be accomplished. The award was bestowed during the SC23 conference.

ACM has named David B. Papworth, formerly of Intel (retired), as the recipient of the ACM Charles P. “Chuck” Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award. Papworth is recognized for fundamental groundbreaking contributions to Intel’s P6 out-of-order engine and Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) processors. Papworth was a lead designer of the Intel P6 (sold commercially as the Pentium Pro) microprocessor, which was a major advancement over the existing state-of-the-art, not just for Intel but for the broader computer design community.

Kunle Olukotun, a Professor at Stanford University, is the recipient of the 2023 ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award for contributions and leadership in the development of parallel systems, especially multicore and multithreaded processors. In the early 1990s, Olukotun became a leading designer of a new kind of microprocessor known as a “chip multiprocessor”—today called a “multicore processor.” His work demonstrated the performance advantages of multicore processors over the existing microprocessor designs at the time.

Aayush Jain is the recipient of the 2022 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for establishing the feasibility of mathematically rigorous software obfuscation from well-studied hardness conjectures. Honorable Mentions for the 2022 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award go to Alane Suhr whose PhD was earned at Cornell University, and Conrad Watt, who earned his PhD at the University of Cambridge.

James Gregory Pauloski of the University of Chicago and Rohan Basu Roy Of Northeastern University are the 2023 ACM-IEEE CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowships recipients. Hua Huang of the Georgia Institute of Technology received an Honorable Mention. The Fellowships will be formally presented at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC23) in November.

Jack J. Dongarra of University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory received the 2021 ACM A.M. Turing Award for pioneering contributions to numerical algorithms and libraries that enabled high performance computational software to keep pace with exponential hardware improvements for over four decades.

Alfred Aho, Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, and Jeffrey Ullman, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University received the 2020 ACM A.M. Turing Award for fundamental algorithms and theory underlying programming language implementation, and for synthesizing these results and those of others in their highly influential books, which educated generations of computer scientists.

Ed Catmull, computer scientist and former president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, and Pat Hanrahan, a founding employee at Pixar and Stanford University professor received the 2019 ACM A.M. Turing Award for fundamental contributions to 3-D computer graphics, and the revolutionary impact of these techniques on computer-generated imagery (CGI) in filmmaking and other applications.

Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal, Geoffrey Hinton of Google, and Yann LeCun of Facebook received the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.

John L. Hennessy, former President of Stanford University, and David A. Patterson, retired Professor of the University of California, Berkeley, received the 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award for pioneering a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures with enduring impact on the microprocessor industry.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Oxford received the 2016 ACM A.M. Turing Award for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale.