ACM Awards

ACM has named Mendel Rosenblum of Stanford University the first recipient of the ACM Charles P. "Chuck" Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award. Rosenblum is recognized for reinventing the virtual machine for the modern era and thereby revolutionizing datacenters and enabling modern cloud computing. With his students at Stanford, he brought virtual machines back to life by using them to solve challenging technical problems in building system software for scalable multiprocessors.

ACM has named Elisa Bertino of Purdue University the 2019-2020 Athena Lecturer. Bertino was cited for pioneering and impactful contributions to data management and data security theory and systems, along with outstanding contributions to broadening participation in computing via professional leadership and mentoring. She is recognized as one of the top database security experts worldwide, and has made contributions to data security and privacy in many different contexts.

ACM named Gerald C. Combs recipient of the 2018 ACM Software System Award for creating the Wireshark network protocol analyzer, an essential tool for nearly anyone who designs, deploys, analyzes and troubleshoots the wide range of network protocols that tie the internet together, and for continued leadership of the international Wireshark developer community. Wireshark became the most commonly used system for visually analyzing network protocol traffic.

Constantinos Daskalakis and Michael J. Freedman are honored with the 2018 Grace Murray Hopper Award. Daskalakis, a professor at MIT, is recognized for his seminal contributions to the theory of computation and economics, particularly the complexity of Nash Equilibrium. Princeton's Freedman is cited for the design and deployment of self-organizing geo-distributed systems.

Pavel Pevzner has been named the 2018 ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award recipient for pioneering contributions to the theory, design and implementation of algorithms for string reconstruction and to their applications in the assembly of genomes. He made fundamental contributions to the theoretical study of string algorithms and to their application to scalable reconstruction of genomes and other biological sequences such as antibodies and antibiotics.

Henry Kautz is the recipient of the 2018 ACM – AAAI Allen Newell Award for contributions to artificial intelligence and computational social science, including fundamental results on the complexity of inference, planning and media analytics for public health. He studied how computers can infer the goals and plans of people by studying their behavior, and was a co-developer of the first randomized local search algorithms for Boolean satisfiability testing.

Robert Sedgewick was named recipient of the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for developing classic textbooks and online materials for the study of algorithms, analytic combinatorics, and introductory computer science that have educated generations of students worldwide. Sedgewick is best known for his series of Algorithms textbooks, which have been bestsellers for four decades (12 books in four editions covering five programming languages).

Victor Bahl was named recipient of the ACM Distinguished Service Awardfor significant and lasting service to the broad community of mobile computing and wireless networking, and for building strong linkages between academia, industry, and government agencies. His efforts have led to the creation of a prolific global community with a strong foundation that has created leaders and fostered and supported tens of thousands of researchers and engineers worldwide working in these areas.

Meenakshi Balakrishnan received the 2018 ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics for his research, development, and deployment of cost-effective embedded-system and software solutions addressing mobility and education challenges of the visually impaired in the developing world. These technologies are especially valuable in the developing world, where there are fewer resources for the visually impaired.

Chris Stephenson was named recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award for advancing CS education by architecting and nurturing the Computer Science Teachers Association to incorporate more than 22,000 K-12 CS educators and partners into the ACM community. Her scholarly research contributions have been disseminated in several influential reports.

The ACM Women's Council (ACM-W) has created the ACM-W Rising Star Award, recognizing a woman whose early-career research has had significant impact on the computing discipline. 2018 ACM Athena Lecturer Andrea Goldsmith wanted to "give back" to women in the computing community after receiving that honor, and was instrumental in creating this award. The winner will be recognized at a conference of her choosing, and will receive a framed certificate and $1000 stipend. Read more in the ACM-W Connections newsletter.

ACM has named 49 Distinguished Members for outstanding contributions to the field. The 2018 ACM Distinguished Members are exemplars for their peers, and represent ACM’s worldwide geographic reach, as well as the exciting range of subdisciplines that constitute today’s technology landscape. 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 2018-2019 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 2018 winners are Naveen Durvasula (Montgomery Blair High School, Silver Spring, Maryland), Isha Puri (Horace Greeley High School, Chappaqua, New York), Eshika Saxena (Interlake High School, Bellevue, Washington) and Varun Shenoy (Cupertino High School, Cupertino, California).

Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee was awarded the 2019 SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering at the SIAM's CSE19 conference. Dongarra was recognized for his key role in the development of software and software standards, software repositories, performance and benchmarking software, and in community efforts to prepare for the challenges of exascale computing, especially in adapting linear algebra infrastructure to emerging architectures. He is a Fellow of AAAS, ACM, IEEE, and SIAM, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He also received the 2013 ACM/IEEE Ken Kennedy Award.

ACM has named 56 members ACM Fellows for significant contributions in areas including computer architecture, mobile networks, robotics, and systems security. The accomplishments of the 2018 ACM Fellows underpin the technologies that define the digital age and greatly impact our professional and personal lives. ACM Fellows are composed of an elite group that represents less than 1% of the Association’s global membership. "We are honored to add a new class of Fellows to ACM’s ranks and we look forward to the guidance and counsel they will provide to our organization," said ACM President Cherri M. Pancake. (Pictured are the 2017 ACM Fellows.)