Ilias Diakonikolas Receives the 2024 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award
Ilias Diakonikolas, a Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is the recipient of the 2024 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award. He is cited for making contributions to the field of algorithmic robust statistics by introducing new techniques to robustly estimate high-dimensional distributions along with a surprising variety of algorithmic applications.
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 Developers of MPICH
William Gropp, University of Illinois; Pavan Balaji, Meta; Rajeev Thakur, Yanfei Guo, Kenneth Raffenetti, and Hui Zhou (all of Argonne National Laboratory), receive the 2024 ACM Software System Award for MPICH, which has powered 30 years of progress in computational science and engineering by providing scalable, robust, and portable communication software for parallel computers.
The ACM Software System Award is presented to an institution or individual(s) recognized 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.
Hugo Krawczyk Receives Kanellakis Award
Hugo Krawczyk, Senior Principal Scientist, Amazon, receives the 2024 ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for pioneering and lasting contributions to the theoretical foundations of cryptographically secure communications, and to the protocols that form the security foundations of the Internet.
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 Peter Stone for Significant Contributions to AI
Peter Stone, Professor, University of Texas at Austin and Chief Scientist, Sony AI, receives the 2024 ACM – AAAI Allen Newell Award for significant contributions to the theory and practice of artificial intelligence (AI), especially in reinforcement learning, multiagent systems, transfer learning, and intelligent robotics.
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.
Featured ACM Member: Derek Dreyer
Derek Dreyer is a Scientific Director at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) in Saarbrücken, Germany, where he leads the Foundations of Programming Group. His broad range of interests include type systems, semantics of programming languages, verification of concurrent programs, and interactive theorem proving. In his research statement, Dreyer writes that his goal is “to produce rigorous formal foundations for establishing the safety and reliability of software systems.”
Dreyer has been active with the ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (ACM SIGPLAN). He was Program Chair for the 2024 ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) and General Chair for the 2019 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP). He is also co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Functional Programming (JFP), as well as an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS). Among his honors, he has received the 2017 ACM SIGPLAN Robin Milner Young Researcher Award and was recently named an ACM Fellow for contributions to the logical and semantic foundations of programming languages.
In his interview, he discusses the RustBelt project and its open-source development model, Iris separation logic, his unique appreciation of classical music, and more.
Featured ACM Member: Carl Landwehr
Since retiring from the National Science Foundation in 2011, Carl E. Landwehr has served in many positions, most recently as Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and lead research scientist at the Cyber Security and Privacy Research Institute, George Washington University. His interests include cybersecurity and trustworthy computing. Landwehr is recognized for developing and leading cybersecurity research programs at many institutions, including the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Among his honors, Landwehr received ACM SIGSAC’s Outstanding Contribution Award, was inducted into the National Cybersecurity Hall of Fame, and made a Fellow of IEEE. He was recently selected as the recipient of the Computing Research Association’s Distinguished Service Award.
In his interview, he discusses developments in computer security, trustworthy computing, teaching undergraduates make good decisions in cybersecurity and public policy, and more
Read Landwehr’s interview here
ACM TechTalk: Mayo Oshin and Nuno Campos
View the recent ACM Techtalk “Building Reliable AI Agents and LLM Apps Using LangChain and LangGraph” with Mayo Oshin and Nuno Campos. If you’re looking to build production-ready AI applications that can reason and retrieve external data for context-awareness, you’ll need to master LangChain—a popular development framework and platform for building applications based on large language models (LLMs). LangGraph is an open-source AI agent framework designed to build, deploy, and manage complex generative AI agent workflows.
In this talk, Mayo Oshin and Nuno Campos describe how LLM apps are different—latency, unreliable inputs, unreliable outputs—and how LangChain and LangGraph help.
ACM ByteCast: Michael J. Freedman
In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts ACM Fellow Michael J. Freedman, Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University and co-Founder and CTO of Timescale. Michael’s research interests are in distributed systems, networking, and security. Over the course of his student and professional career, he designed and operated the Coral Content Distribution Network, a peer-to-peer content distribution network; co-founded (with Martin Casado) Illuminics Systems, an IP analytics company; and designed TimescaleDB and JetStream. His many honors and recognitions include the 2018 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award.
Here, Michael shares what drew him to computer science, highlighting the value of initiative and gumption as an undergraduate student, how he became interested in security and privacy, working on peer-to-peer systems before cloud computing became ubiquitous, his work on Coral CDN during his PhD research, explains the roles of CTO and head engineer at a technology company, and more.