David A. Padua Recognised With ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award
David A. Padua, Donald Biggar Willett Professor Emeritus of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the recipient of the 2024 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award. Padua is cited for innovative and usable contributions to the theory and practice of parallel compilation and tools, as well as service to the computing community.
Padua has made fundamental contributions that have helped make parallel computation universally useful. He has worked at the levels of fundamental algorithms for parallelism, general tools for parallel programming (compilers and debuggers), and domain-specific languages, applications, and tools, as well as autotuning methods and compiler quality evaluation.
The Ken Kennedy Award recognises groundbreaking achievements in parallel and high-performance computing. Pingali is cited for contributions to high-performance parallel computing for irregular algorithms such as graph algorithms. The award will be formally presented to Padua in November at The International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC24).
ACM TechTalk: Abhinav Kimothi
View the recent ACM Techtalk, “Introduction to Retrieval Augmented Generation” with Abhinav Kimothi, co-founder and the Vice President of AI at Yarnit, a pioneering content marketing platform that leverages Generative AI, recommendation systems, and machine learning to revolutionise the way marketers create content.
The generative AI space has been rapidly evolving. While we are in a phase of rapid experimentation and PoCs, 2025 is pegged to be the year of generative AI driving real business value. With the growing demands of complex use cases on AI systems, the need for more context-aware models has been rising. Retrieval Augmented Generation, or RAG, is a novel technique that enhances the natural language abilities of Large Language Models by integrating external knowledge retrieval with generation.
This introductory talk is aimed at explaining why RAG is becoming a critical component of the AI toolkit. If you want to build AI systems or are simply interested in the latest trends in generative AI, this session is designed to provide an introduction, insights, and practical knowledge on RAG.
Featured ACM Member: Chad Jenkins
Odest Chadwicke “Chad” Jenkins is a Professor of Robotics as well as Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. He directs the Laboratory for Progress (Perceptive Robotics and Grounded Reasoning Systems), where he aims to discover methods for computational reasoning and perception that will enable robots to effectively assist people in common human environments. His research interests include robot learning, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and human-robot interaction for humanoid robots and autonomous mobilCoe manipulation systems.
Jenkins’ service to the field includes being the founding Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI) and Vice President for Educational Activities for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. Jenkins is the recipeint of the 2024 Richard Tapia Award.
In his interview, Jenkins discusses his path to becoming a roboticist, humanoid robotics and its impact on society, his time as EiC of THRI, and more. Read Jenkins’ interview here.
Featured ACM Member: Ramón Cáceres
Ramón Cáceres is a computer science researcher and software engineer who most recently built large-scale privacy infrastructure at Google. Earlier in his career, he held positions at Bell Labs, IBM Research, and AT&T Labs. His areas of focus have included systems and networks, mobile and edge computing, mobility modeling, security, and privacy. Among his honors, Cáceres received the ACM SIGMOBILE Test of Time Award which recognises papers that have had a sustained and significant impact in the SIGMOBILE community over at least a decade. He has been named an IEEE Fellow and was recently named an ACM Fellow for contributions to mobile and edge computing.
In his interview, Cáceres doscisses working on Google’s global authorisation system Zanzibar, receiving the 2022 ACM SIGMOBILE Test of Time Award, the union of mobile computing, artificial intelligence, and privacy preservation, widening participation in computing, and more. Read Cáceres’ interview here.
