Saman Amarasinghe Recognised With ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award
ACM and the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE CS) have named Saman Amarasinghe, Thomas and Gerd Perkins Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as the recipient of the 2025 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award. The Ken Kennedy Award recognises groundbreaking achievements in parallel and high-performance computing. Amarasinghe is cited for fundamental contributions pioneering high-performance domain-specific languages, exceptional mentorship, and service advancing the global computing community.
Amarasinghe leads the Commit compiler research group in MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Born in Sri Lanka and schooled at Royal College, Colombo, he is a graduate of Cornell University and earned his Master’s and PhD degrees from Stanford University. He was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2019.
ACM and the IEEE Computer Society co-sponsor the Kennedy Award, which was established in 2009 to recognise substantial contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and significant community service or mentoring contributions. It was named for the late Ken Kennedy, founder of Rice University’s computer science program and a world expert on high-performance computing. The Kennedy Award carries a US $5,000 honorarium endowed by IEEE CS and ACM.
2025 ACM-IEEE CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowships
Ana Veroneze Solórzano of Northeastern University and Yafan Huang of The University of Iowa are the recipients of the 2025 ACM-IEEE CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowships. Aristotle Martin of Duke University received an Honorable Mention. The George Michael Memorial Fellowship honours exceptional PhD students throughout the world whose research focus is high-performance computing (HPC) applications, networking, storage, or large-scale data analytics.
Solórzano is recognised for broadening the societal impact of HPC using privacy-preserving and incentive-driven mechanisms. Huang is recognised for advancing exascale high-performance computing by creating ultra-fast lossy compression algorithms and versatile program-agnostic fault tolerance. Martin’s work involves developing a heterogeneous, performance-portable multiscale modeling framework leveraging exascale systems for large-scale adhesive transport simulations of circulating tumor cells. Read the news release.
Featured ACM Member: Meeyoung Cha
Meeyoung Cha is a Scientific Director with the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP), as well as a Professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). At MPI-SP, she leads the Data Science for Humanity Group. Her interests include poverty mapping, fake news detection, involvement with NGOs, and mentoring junior researchers. Among her honours, she received the Hong Jin-Ki Creator Award (2024), the Korean Young Information Scientist Award (2019) and Test of Time Awards at ACM IMC 2022 and AAAI ICWSM 2020.
Cha was named an ACM Distinguished Member for her contributions to computational social science research on misinformation, fraud detection, and poverty mapping. Read Cha’s interview here.
Featured ACM Member: Guoliang Xing
Guoliang Xing is a Professor and Director of the AIoT Lab at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). His research spans embedded AI, AI for health, autonomous driving and cyber-physical systems. Highlights of his work include leading the development and field deployment of large-scale systems for roadside infrastructure–assisted autonomous driving, early clinical diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, and real-time volcano monitoring. His work has received seven Best Paper Awards, five Best Demo/Poster/Artifact Awards and seven Best Paper Finalist distinctions at top-tier international conferences.
Xing serves as an Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare and ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, and has served as general or program co-chair for multiple ACM conferences. He was recently named an ACM Fellow for contributions to embedded AI and mobile computing systems. Read Xing’s interview here.
ACM ByteCast: Cecilia Aragon
In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Bruke Kifle hosts ACM Distinguished Member Cecilia Aragon, Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering and Director of the Human-Centered Data Science Lab at the University of Washington (UW). She is the co-inventor (with Raimund Seidel) of the treap data structure, a binary search tree in which each node has both a key and a priority. She is also known for her work in data-intensive science and visual analytics of very large data sets, for which she received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2008. She is a co-founder of Latinas in Computing.
Here, Aragon shares her journey into computing, starting as a math major at Caltech with a love of the Lisp programming language, to vital work innovating data structures, visual analytics tools for astronomy (Sunfall), and augmented reality systems for aviation. She highlights the importance of making data science more human-centered and inclusive practices in design, talks about Viata, a startup she co-founded with her son, applying visualisation research from her lab to help people solve everyday travel planning challenges, and more.
ICAIF, 15—18 November
ACM International Conference on AI in Finance is a peer-reviewed scholarly conference that brings together researchers from academia, government, and industry to share challenges, advances, and insights on the impact of artificial intelligence and machine learning in finance. Workshops include “AI and Data Science for Digital Finance” “LLMs and Generative AI for Finance,” “Explainable AI in Finance: Achieving Trustworthy Financial Decision-Making,” “AI for Resilient & Responsible DeFi Dynamics,” “AI for Financial Fraud Detection & Prevention” and more. The event will be held in Singapore.