Ricardo Baeza-Yates Receives 2025 ACM Luiz André Barroso Award
ACM has named Ricardo Baeza-Yates the recipient of the 2025 ACM Luiz André Barroso Award for theoretical and applied Luiz André Barroso Award for his pioneering contributions to algorithms and information retrieval as well as his leadership in fostering a vibrant transnational research community across Latin America.
Baeza-Yates is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost researchers in information retrieval, celebrated especially for pioneering innovative data structures that have shaped the field. His work has produced influential algorithms for string searching and fuzzy matching, including the well-known Shift-Or algorithm. He has also played a pivotal role in strengthening the Latin American computing community, leading to a vibrant technology sector in Chile reflected in today’s moniker of “Chilecon Valley”.
The Luiz André Barroso Award celebrates researchers from communities historically underrepresented in computing from across the world who have made fundamental contributions to computer science.
The award carries a cash prize of $40,000 provided by Google. Read the ACM news release.
Featured ACM Member: Vivek Seshadri
Vivek Seshadri is the Co-Founder and CTO of Karya. Karya’s mission is to create AI-enabled earning and learning opportunities for low-income communities across the globe. Vivek led the early design and development of the Karya platform, a mobile-first digital work platform to distribute a variety of language data tasks.
Starting in India, Karya has engaged 100,000+ workers (primarily in rural communities), distributed $3M+ in wages, and supported the creation of digital resources in 70+ languages.
The idea for the platform grew out of a set of influential papers Seshadri and colleagues presented at leading conferences such as ACM CHI, ACM FAccT, ACM COMPASS, and LREC. For his research and societal contributions, Seshadri received the 2025 ACM India Early Career Researcher Award.
In his interview, he discusses developing his digital work platform, solving challenges at various levels of the data ecosystem, how his approach enables upward socio-economic mobility, and more. Read Seshadri’s interview here.
Featured ACM Member: Sylvia Ratnasamy
Sylvia Ratnasamy is a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she co-leads the Networked Systems (NetSys) research group. She serves on the Steering Committee for the ACM SIGCOMM conference, and is a member of the Sloan Research Fellowship Selection Committee.
Among her honors, Ratnasamy received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 2014 for her work on distributed hash tables (DHTs), which are a critical element in many modern distributed and peer-to-peer computing systems. More recently, she was co-founder and CTO of Nefeli Networks, a startup that commercialized her research on network function virtualisation. Ratnasamy was recently named an ACM Fellow for her contributions to networks and networked systems.
In her interview, she discusses decentralised content addressable networks, the infrastructure improvements needed to increase data speed, the “digital unification of industrial architectures,” and more. Read Ratnasamy’s interview here.
ACM ByteCast: Peter Stone
In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts 2024 ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award recipient Peter Stone, Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and Chief Scientist at Sony AI.
He received the award for significant contributions to the theory and practice of AI, especially in reinforcement learning (RL), multiagent systems, transfer learning, and intelligent robotics.
As a leading figure in AI research, Stone has fundamentally advanced how autonomous agents learn, plan, and collaborate. His groundbreaking work on RL algorithms has enabled robots to acquire skills through experience. He is an ACM, AAAI, AAAS, and IEEE Fellow, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar.
Here, Peter explores the intersection of professional research and personal passion, detailing how his lifelong love for soccer fueled his involvement in RoboCup, where he aims to develop humanoid robots capable of competing at a World Cup level by 2050. He discusses his leadership as the Chief Scientist of Sony AI, the importance of ad hoc teamwork, his passion for undergraduate research and advocacy for AI education at all levels, and more.
ACM ByteCast: Monica Bergnatolli
In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Sabrina Hsueh and Li Zhou host Monica Bertagnolli, a surgical oncologist, physician-scientist and President Elect of the National Academy of Medicine – the first woman to hold that position in NAM’s history.
She previously served as the 17th Director of the National Institutes of Health and the 16th Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), as well as President of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. In the past, she was the Richard E. Wilson Professor of Surgery in surgical oncology at Harvard Medical School, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and a member of the Gastrointestinal Cancer Treatment and Sarcoma Centers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
In the interview, Dr Bertagnolli shares her unique journey from Princeton engineering to cancer surgery and national leadership, highlights her role in founding mCODE – an initiative to improve patient care through oncological data interoperability – and how NAM’s six core commitments and ten guiding principles for responsible AI address issues of bias and equity. She also offers insights on the growing erosion of trust in science and medicine, and how to restore it.
ACM Bytecast Archive available here
ACM Conferences & Events
CPS-IoT, 11-14 May 2026
CPS-IoT Week is the premier event on Cyber-Physical Systems and the Internet-of-Things. It brings together four top conferences, HSCC/ICCPS, SenSys, and RTAS, multiple workshops, tutorials and competitions including “Energy Harvesting and Energy-Neutral Sensing Systems”, “Computation-Aware Algorithmic Design for Cyber-Physical Systems”, “Data-Driven Modeling of Hybrid Automata within a Unified Model Learning Framework”, “Closing the Loop in Multimodal Edge AI for Healthcare” and more. Keynote speakers are Xia Zhou (Columbia University) and Rodolfo Pellizzoni (University of Waterloo). The event is being held in Saint Malo, France.
WebSci, 26-29 May 2026
The ACM Web Science Conference is an interdisciplinary field dedicated to understanding the complex and multiple impacts of the Web on society and vice versa. The discipline is well situated to address pressing issues of our time by incorporating various scientific approaches. Workshops and tutorials include “Diffusion of Harmful Content on Online Web”, “Second International Workshop on Protecting Women Online”, “The Effects of the Adaptive Web on Society”, “Getting Involved in Technology Policy for Web Researchers” and more. Keynote speaker is ACM Fellow James Hendler (RPI). The event is being held in Lower Saxony, Germany.
SIGMOD/PODS, 31 May-5 June 2026
The ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference is a leading international forum for database researchers, practitioners, developers and users to explore cutting-edge ideas and results, and to exchange techniques, tools, and experiences. Workshops and tutorials include “Data Formats for Modern Architectures and Workloads”, “Exploiting Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Data Management” and more. Keynote speakers will be Gustavo Alonso (ETH Zurich), Tova Milo (Tel Aviv University) and Prabhakar Raghavan (Google), The event is being held in Bengaluru, India.