Margaret Martonosi Receives 2023 ACM Frances E. Allen Award for Outstanding Mentoring
Margaret Martonosi is the recipient of the 2023 ACM Frances E. Allen Award for Outstanding Mentoring. Martonosi is recognised 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 a four-year term as the National Science Foundation (NSF) Assistant Director leading the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE).
The ACM Frances E. Allen Award is presented biennially to an individual who has exemplified excellence and/or innovation in mentoring, with particular attention to recognition of individuals who have shown outstanding leadership in promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in computing. The award is accompanied by a prize of $25,000 to the awardee and an additional $10,000 cash contribution to an approved charity of the awardee’s choice. Financial support is provided by Microsoft Research.
Prateek Mittal Receives ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award
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.
The ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award is given 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. Financial support for this award is provided by Microsoft.
Software System Award Goes to Andrew S. Tanenbaum for MINIX
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.
The ACM Software System Award is presented to an institution or individual(s) recognised for developing a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both. The Software System Award carries a prize of $35,000. Financial support for the Software System Award is provided by IBM.
Contributors to Algorithm Engineering Receive Kanellakis Award
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 revolutionised 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
The ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award honors specific theoretical accomplishments that have had a significant and demonstrable effect on the practice of computing. This award is accompanied by a prize of $10,000 and is endowed by contributions from the Kanellakis family, with additional financial support provided by ACM’s Special Interest Groups on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT), Design Automation (SIGDA), Management of Data (SIGMOD), and Programming Languages (SIGPLAN), the ACM SIG Projects Fund, and individual contributions.
ACM, AAAI Recognize David Blei for Significant Contributions to Machine Learning
David Blei of Columbia University receives the ACM – AAAI Allen Newell Award. Blei is recognised 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.
The ACM – AAAI Allen Newell Award is presented to an individual selected for career contributions that have breadth within computer science, or that bridge computer science and other disciplines. The Newell award is accompanied by a prize of $10,000, provided by ACM and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and by individual contributions.
ACM President Honors Anand Deshpande with 2023 Presidential Award
ACM President Yannis Ioannidis has recognised Anand Deshpande, Managing Director, Persistent Systems, with the ACM Presidential Award for long-standing contributions to the broader computing community and to ACM are characterized by his visionary leadership, strategic collaboration, and a commitment to advancing the field of computing science and engineering.
He is one of few people who have served all three pillars of the “Triangle of Knowledge” with great success. He has been a respected researcher in his early career, he has created an extremely successful and impactful company in India from scratch, and in addition to his educational efforts as a young faculty member, he has led several concerted efforts to educate the young generation in entrepreneurial thinking in technological areas and beyond.
This award is given at the discretion of the ACM President, to individuals whose contributions in computing fall within the goals of the ACM.
ACM President Honors M. Tamer Özsu with 2023 Presidential Award
ACM President Yannis Ioannidis has recognized M. Tamer Özsu with the ACM Presidential Award for long-standing and significant contributions to the computing field and its scientific community in general, as well as to ACM in particular. In addition to his seminal research work on large-scale distributed data management and his emphasis on system building targeting grand societal challenges, he has truly dedicated himself to the education of the young generation, way beyond his own PhD and other students.
The books he has co-authored, the encyclopedias he has co-edited, and the series he has curated have all been definitive resources of fundamental and application-oriented data science knowledge, nurturing and inspiring young researchers and practitioners for decades.
This award is given at the discretion of the ACM President, to individuals whose contributions in computing fall within the goals of the ACM.
ACM ByteCast: Juan E. Gilbert
In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Scott Hanselman welcomes ACM Fellow Juan Gilbert, the Andrew Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Professor and Chair of the Computer & Information Science & Engineering Department at the University of Florida where he leads the Computing for Social Good Lab. Gilbert’s many honors and recognitions include the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring, the CRA A. Nico Habermann Award, and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation (NMTI).
Here, Juan shares with Scott his surprise at being nominated for the NMTI, which he received in 2023 from President Joe Biden for pioneering a universal voting system that makes voting more reliable and accessible for everyone and for increasing diversity in the computer science workforce. He talks about his lab’s mission to change the world by solving real-world problems, principles such as “barrier-free design” that he and his collaborators applied to his lab’s voting machine technology, how he and his lab choose which projects they work on and teases the promise of brain-computer interaction technology.
ACM TechTalk: Chip Huyen
Register now for the next free ACM TechTalk, “From ML Engineering to AI Engineering,” presented on Thursday, June 27 at 12:00 pm ET/4:00 pm UTC by Chip Huyen, bestselling author and Vice President of AI and Open-Source Software at Voltron Data. Alejandro Saucedo, Director of Engineering, Science & Product at Zalando SE, will moderate the questions and answers session following the talk.
This talk explores the unique challenges of productionizing foundation models compared to traditional machine learning models. Despite sharing some core principles, foundation models introduce new complexities due to their open-ended nature, advanced capabilities, and computational demands. Key changes include shifting from closed-ended to open-ended evaluation, from feature engineering to context construction, and from structured data to unstructured data.
Featured ACM Member: Xing Xie
Xing Xie is a Partner Research Manager at Microsoft Research Asia and a guest PhD advisor at the University of Science and Technology of China. His research interests include data mining, social computing, and responsible AI.
Xie serves on the editorial boards of several publications including ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems (TORS), ACM Transactions on Social Computing (TSC), and ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST), among others. His work has been recognised with several awards including the ACM SIGKDD 2022 Test of Time Award and the ACM SIGKDD China 2021 Test of Time Award. He is a Fellow of the China Computing Federation and was recently named an ACM Fellow for contributions to spatial data mining and recommendation systems.
In his interview, he discusses Microsoft Research’s Societal AI initiative, how AI is transforming recommendation systems, and more.
