Raluca Ada Popa, University of California, Berkeley, is the recipient of the 2021 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for the design of secure distributed systems. The systems protect confidentiality against attackers with full access to servers while maintaining full functionality. Popa’s research provides confidentiality guarantees where servers only need to store encrypted data, processing it without decrypting. Thus, hackers see only encrypted data. Computing on encrypted data, possible in theory, has been prohibitively inefficient inpractice. Popa addresses this by replacing generality with building systems for a broad set of applications with common traits, and developing encryption schemes tailored to these application archetypes.

Xavier Leroy, Collège de France; Sandrine Blazy, University of Rennes 1, IRISA; Zaynah Dargaye, Nomadic Labs; Jacques-Henri Jourdan, CNRS, Laboratoire Méthodes Formelles; Michael Schmidt, AbsInt Angewandte Informatik; Bernhard Schommer, Saarland University and AbsInt Angewandte Informatik GmbH; and Jean-Baptiste Tristan, Boston College, receive the ACM Software System Award for the development of CompCert, the first practically useful optimizing compiler targeting multiple commercial architectures that has a complete, mechanically checked proof of its correctness.

Avrim Blum, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago; Irit Dinur, Weizmann Institute; Cynthia Dwork, Harvard University; Frank McSherry, Materialize Inc.; Kobbi Nissim, Georgetown University; and Adam Davison Smith, Boston University, receive the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for their fundamental contributions to the development of differential privacy. Their separate but related work formed a definition of differential privacy which captures the kind of privacy needed in statistical settings, where individual information must be protected while still allowing for discovery of common trends.

Mark Allen Weiss, a Professor at Florida International University, receives the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for advancing the art and science of computer science (CS) education through his textbooks, research, and curriculum design, which have affected thousands of instructors and students worldwide.

Erik Altman receives the ACM Distinguished Service Award for leadership in the computer architecture communities, and for contributions to ACM organizational development. He has demonstrated excellence both as a computer architecture research scientist at IBM and as a driver of positive change within the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society.

Judy Brewer receives the ACM Policy Award for her leadership of the Web Accessibility Initiative and development of multiple web accessibility standards, which have been adopted globally and improved accessibility for millions worldwide. Brewer leads the development of standards and strategies for inclusive web design, providing web developers with tools necessary to bring the power and the promise of the World Wide Web to millions of people.

ACM President Gabriele Kotsis has recognized Dame Wendy Hall for her technical contributions that have significantly influenced the development of the Semantic Web and the field of Web Science, her leadership and impact in shaping technology policy and informatics education internationally, and her committed and inspired work to strengthen ACM’s geographically diverse footprint by fostering regional councils to promote ACM activities in China, India, and Europe.

ACM named Northeastern University’s Carla E. Brodley recipient of the inaugural ACM Frances E. Allen Award for Outstanding Mentoring. Brodley is recognized for significant personal mentorship and leadership in creating systemic programs that have increased diversity in computer science by creating mentoring opportunities for thousands at Northeastern and other universities across the US. An internationally recognized leader in the fields of machine learning, data mining, and artificial intelligence, Brodley has shown a deep commitment to mentoring and increasing diversity in computer science throughout her academic career.

ACM has named Éva Tardos of Cornell University as the 2022-2023 Athena Lecturer. Tardos is recognized for fundamental research contributions to combinatorial optimization, approximation algorithms, and algorithmic game theory, and for her dedicated mentoring and service to these communities. Tardos is one of the most influential leaders in the field of theoretical computer science and an outstanding educator, mentor, and leader in her scientific community.

ACM has named 71 members 2021 ACM Fellows for significant contributions in areas including algorithms, computer science education, cryptography, data security and privacy, medical informatics, and mobile and networked systems, 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 63 Distinguished Members for outstanding contributions to the field. All 2021 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.

ACM and the Computer Science Teachers Association have announced the 2021-2022 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 2020-2021 recipients are Harshal Bharatia, Plano Senior High School, Plano, Texas; Yash Narayan, The Nueva School, San Mateo, California; Shoumik Roychowdhury, Westwood High School, Austin, Texas; and Hiya Shah, Amador Valley High School, Pleasanton, California. Read the news release.

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 recipient 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.

Suhail Sherif of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai has received the ACM India Council's 2021-2022 Doctoral Dissertation Award for "Communication Complexity and Quantum Optimization Lower Bounds via Query Complexity." Honorable Mentions went to Suprovat Ghoshal of Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, for "New Algorithmic and Hardness Results in Learning, Error Correcting Codes and Constraint Satisfaction Problems;" and to Vrunda Dave of Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, for "On Some Fundamental Problems and Applications of Word Transducers."

David Abramson of the University of Queensland has been named the recipient of the 2021 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award. Abramson is recognized for contributions to parallel and distributed computing tools, with application from quantum chemistry to engineering design. He is also cited for his mentorship and service to the field. The award was presented at SC21: The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis virtual awards plenary session in November.

A 14-member research team from Chinese institutions was awarded the 2021 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for their project, Closing the "Quantum Supremacy" Gap: Achieving Real-Time Simulation of a Random Quantum Circuit Using a New Sunway Supercomputer. The project far outpaced state-of-the-art approaches to simulating an RQC. The award was bestowed during the SC21 conference, which was held in person and virtually.

The 2021 ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize for High Performance Computing-Based COVID-19 Research was presented to a six-member team for their project Digital transformation of droplet/aerosol infection risk assessment realized on “Fugaku” for the fight against COVID-19. 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. The award was presented at the hybrid SC21 conference.

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.