ABOUT THIS AWARD

Awarded to the outstanding young computer professional of the year, selected on the basis of a single recent major technical or service contribution. This award is accompanied by a prize of $35,000. The candidate must have been 35 years of age or less at the time the qualifying contribution was made. Effective with the 2013 award, the financial sponsor of the Grace Murray Hopper Award is Microsoft Research.

Sylvia Ratnasamy Receives 2014 Grace Murray Hopper Award 

Ratnasamy is recognized for her contributions to the first efficient design for distributed hash tables (DHT), a critical element in large-scale distributed and peer-to-peer computing systems. Ratnasamy’s innovative design and implementation of networked systems enables a data object in a network to be located quickly without requiring a central registry. Her recent research introduces RouteBricks, an approach that makes networks easier to build, program and evolve, and is used as a way to exploit parallelism to scale software routers. She is an assistant professor in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Press Release

ACM will present the 2014 ACM Awards at its annual Awards Banquet on June 20 in San Francisco, CA.


Pedro Felipe Felzenszwalb named recipient of the 2013 Grace Murray Hopper Award

Pedro Felipe Felzenszwalb is the recipient of the 2013 Grace Murray Hopper Award for contributions to object recognition in pictures and video. Felzenszwalb developed innovative methods that have become key building blocks for most solutions to object recognition. His recent approach uses a sliding window that is moved around the image, testing the underlying image data to determine if local patterns are properly located. He also contributed widely- used, open-source software for computer vision, stimulating new research and applications. Felzenszwalb is an associate professor of Engineering and Computer Science at Brown University.


Martin Casado and Dina Katabi named 2012 recipients of the Grace Murray Hopper Award for advances in network efficiency

 

Martin Casado helped create the Software Defined Networking (SDN) movement, an approach that provides a software alternative to hardware-based network components. He introduced an open interface (OpenFlow) and open-source software components, which uncouple the network from its hardware. This level of abstraction creates virtual networks that are able to deliver the same features as physical networks, but with the operational flexibility of virtualization. These innovations, readily and widely adopted by industry, have spawned a burgeoning SDN research community with the potential to change the field. Casado was Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Nicira, which was acquired by VMware in 2012. He is currently the Chief Network Architect of VMware as well as a consulting assistant professor at Stanford University.
 
Dina Katabi initiated a new approach to network design using an explicit Control Protocol (XCP) that minimizes network congestion and maximizes utilization efficiency. Her research addressed a strategic technological problem of Internet growth, which requires extreme scalability and robustness.  She developed XCP, an algorithm to ensure fair allocation of capacity among different flows that compete for the same Internet bandwidth. Her scheme is the first protocol to achieve both goals simultaneously without imposing excessive per-flow overhead on Internet routers. The design separated the efficiency and fairness policies of congestion control, which delivered the highest possible application performance over a broad range of network infrastructure. Katabi is a professor at MIT and a member of its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). She leads the NetworksMIT research group, and is director of WirelessMIT, the MIT center for wireless networks and mobile computing.