Andrew McGettrick was named recipient of the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for his scholarship and tireless volunteer work and contributions, which have fundamentally improved rigorous computer science as a field of professional practice and as an academic pursuit. His work in curricula, standards and evaluation guidelines improved the quality and rigor of undergraduate, Master’s, and doctoral programs around the world.

Margaret Martonosi, the Hugh Trumbull Adams '35 Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, was named the recipient of the 2021 ACM - IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award for contributions to the design, modeling, and verification of power-efficient computer architecture. Martonosi has made significant contributions in computer architecture and microarchitecture, and her work has led to new fields of research.

Chris Hankin was named recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award for fundamental contributions to ACM Europe and for bringing a European perspective to critically important ACM committees and activities. As Chair of the ACM Europe Council from 2017 to 2019, Hankin made it a priority to strengthen the visibility of ACM among younger generations in Europe. As a member of its policy committee, he co-authored two white papers: one on cybersecurity and one on automated decision making.

Richard Anderson received the 2020 ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics for contributions bridging the fields of computer science, education, and global health. With his students and collaborators, Anderson developed a range of innovative applications in health, education, the internet, and financial services, benefiting underserved communities around the globe.

Marc Rotenberg receives the 2020 ACM Policy Award for long-standing, high-impact leadership on privacy and technology policy. A leading advocate for privacy and data protection, Rotenberg has testified before the US Congress and European Parliament, and is active in several international policy organizations. Rotenberg has mentored two generations of public interest attorneys through internships at EPIC, as an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law, and as the author of many textbooks and articles.

ACM has named Ayanna Howard of The Ohio State University as the 2021-2022 Athena Lecturer. Howard is recognized for fundamental contributions to the development of accessible human-robotic systems and artificial intelligence, along with forging new paths to broaden participation in computing through entrepreneurial and mentoring efforts. Her contributions span theoretical foundations, experimental evaluation, and practical applications.

Chuchu Fan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has received ACM's 2020 Doctoral Dissertation Award for contributions to the verification of embedded and cyber-physical systems and their applications in industrial-scale autonomous systems. Honorable Mentions went to Henry Corrigan-Gibbs of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ralf Jung of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems and MIT.

ACM and the Computer Science Teachers Association have announced the 2020-2021 winners 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 2020-2021 winners are Sahithi Ankireddy, James B. Conant High School, Hoffman Estates, Illinois; Maurice Korish, Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School, Livingston, New Jersey; Brian Minnick, Loudoun Valley High School, Purcellville, Virginia; and Emily Yuan, Thomas S. Wootton High School, Rockville, Maryland.

ACM presented Special Awards to finalists in the 2021 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), the world's largest high school science research competition, held virtually May 16-21, 2021. Nearly 2,000 high school students competed to reach the finals. Each year, organizations representing government, industry and education serve as Special Award Sponsors, providing awards, scholarships, internships and other prizes to student finalists. In addition to monetary prizes, ACM also provides complimentary ACM Student Lite Memberships for the duration of the award recipients' undergraduate education.

ACM has named Alfred Aho, Lawrence Gussman Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, and Jeffrey Ullman, Stanford W. Ascherman Professor Emeritus at Stanford University and CEO of Gradiance Corporation, recipients of 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.

ACM named Margo Seltzer, Michael Olson and Keith Bostic recipients of the 2020 ACM Software System Award for Berkeley DB, which was an early exemplar of the NoSQL movement and pioneered the “dual-license�? approach to software licensing. Seltzer and Bostic founded Sleepycat Software to continue development of Berkeley DB and provide commercial support. Olson joined in 1997, and for 10 years, Berkeley DB was the de facto data store for major web infrastructure.

Yossi Azar, Andrei Broder, Anna Karlin, Michael Mitzenmacher, and Eli Upfal have been named 2020 ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award recipients for the discovery and analysis of balanced allocations, known as the power of two choices, and their extensive applications to practice. The Balanced Allocations paper and the follow-up work on the power of two choices are elegant theoretical results, and their content will continue to have a demonstrable effect on the practice of computing.

ACM has named Michael Franz of the University of California, Irvine the recipient of the ACM Charles P. "Chuck" Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award. Franz is recognized for the development of just-in-time compilation techniques that enable fast and feature-rich web services on the internet. Every day, millions of people around the world use online applications such as Gmail and Facebook. These web applications would not have been possible without the groundbreaking compilation technique Franz developed in the mid 1990s.

The 2020 ACM – AAAI Allen Newell Award honors Hector Levesque and Moshe Vardi. Levesque is recognized for fundamental contributions to knowledge representation and reasoning, and their broader influence within theoretical computer science, databases, robotics, and the study of Boolean satisfiability. Vardi is cited for contributions to the development of logic as a unifying foundational framework and a tool for modeling computational systems.

ACM has named Scott Aaronson of the University of Texas at Austin the recipient of the 2020 ACM Prize in Computing for groundbreaking contributions to quantum computing. Aaronson showed how results from computational complexity theory can provide new insights into the laws of quantum physics, and brought clarity to what quantum computers will, and will not, be able to do. His quantum supremacy experiments allow scientists to give convincing evidence that quantum computers provide exponential speedups without having to first build a full fault-tolerant quantum computer.

George Em Karniadakis of Brown University was awarded the 2021 SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering at SIAM's CSE 2021 conference. Karniadakis was recognized for advancing spectral elements, reduced-order modeling, uncertainty quantification, dissipative particle dynamics, fractional PDEs, and scientific machine learning, while pushing applications to extreme computational scales and mentoring many leaders. A Fellow of SIAM, Karniadakis's work has been cited more than 53,500 times.
Read the SIAM news release.

ACM-W has announced Munmun De Choudhury, an Associate Professor at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, as the winner of the 2021 ACM-W Rising Star Award. The award recognizes a woman whose early-career research has had a significant impact on the computing discipline. De Choudhury's research develops novel computational techniques, and technologies powered by them, to responsibly and ethically employ social media in quantifying, understanding, and improving personal and societal health and well-being.

Shikhar Vashishth of Indian Institute of Science has received the ACM India Council's 2021 Doctoral Dissertation Award for "Neural Graph Embedding Methods for Natural Language Processing." Honorable Mention went to Roohani Sharma of Institute of Mathematical Sciences, for "Advancing the Algorithmic Tool-kit for Parameterized Cut Problems."

ACM has named 95 members 2020 ACM Fellows for significant contributions in areas including artificial intelligence, cloud computing, computer graphics, computational biology, data science, human-computer interaction, software engineering, theoretical computer science, and virtual reality, among other areas. 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 64 Distinguished Members for outstanding contributions to the field. All 2020 inductees are longstanding ACM members and were selected by their peers for a range of accomplishments that have contributed to technologies that move the computing field forward. The ACM Distinguished Member program recognizes up to 10 percent of ACM worldwide membership based on professional experience and significant achievements in computing.

Kazem Cheshmi of the University of Toronto, Madhurima Vardhan of Duke University, and Keren Zhou of Rice University are the recipients of the 2020 ACM-IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowships. The Fellowships will be formally presented at SC20 in November.

Read the ACM news release.

Vivek Sarkar of Georgia Institute of Technology has been named the recipient of the 2020 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award. Sarkar is recognized for foundational technical contributions to the area of programmability and productivity in parallel computing, as well as leadership contributions to professional service, mentoring, and teaching. The award will be presented at SC20: The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis virtual awards plenary session on November 16.

A nine-member research team from Chinese and American institutions was awarded the 2020 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for introducing Deep Potential Molecular Dynamics (DPMD), a new machine learning-based protocol that can simulate a more than 1 nanosecond-long trajectory of over 100 million atoms per day. The award for their project, “Pushing the limit of molecular dynamics with ab initio accuracy to 100 million atoms with machine learning,�? was bestowed during the virtual SC20 conference.

The 2020 ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize for High Performance Computing-Based COVID-19 Research was presented to a 12-member team for their project “AI-Driven Multiscale Simulations Illuminate Mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2 Spike Dynamics.�? The Prize is being awarded in 2020 and 2021 to recognize outstanding research achievement toward the understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic through the use of high performance computing (HPC). The inaugural Prize was awarded at the virtual SC20 conference.

The ACM A.M. Turing Award, computing’s most prestigious honor, acknowledges individuals who have made lasting and major contributions to the field. Here, we look back at some of these technologies and breakthroughs that continue to impact our lives, and the remarkable innovators who helped shape them. 

ACM's celebration of 50 years of the Turing Award culminated with a conference June 23 and 24, 2017 at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco. Keynote talks and panel discussions highlighted the significant impact of the contributions of the Turing Laureates on computing and society, as well as looking ahead to the future of technology and innovation. You can watch videos of these historic presentations here. 

2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award Laureate Yoshua Bengio delivered his Turing Lecture at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) on Monday, September 23. Bengio received the 2018 A.M. Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing. The title of Bengio's lecture is "Deep Learning for AI," and video of Bengio delivering it is available for viewing on the official HLF YouTube channel. 

Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun received the 2018 ACM Turing Award along with Yoshua Bengio for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing, Hinton and LeCun delivered the 2018 ACM Turing Lecture at ACM FCRC in Phoenix on June 23, 2019.

John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson, recipients of 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. They delivered the Turing Lecture at the ISCA conference on June 4, 2018.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee 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. He delivered his Turing Award Lecture at the ACM Web Science Conference in Amsterdam on May 29, 2018.