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 ACM Announces 2018 Turing Award Recipients

ACM has named Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun recipients of the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, ACM’s highest honor, for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.

Working independently and together, Hinton, LeCun and Bengio developed conceptual foundations for the field, identified surprising phenomena through experiments, and contributed engineering advances that demonstrated the practical advantages of deep neural networks. Bengio is Professor, University of Montreal and Scientific Director at Mila, Quebec’s Artificial Intelligence Institute; Hinton is VP and Engineering Fellow, Google, Chief Scientific Adviser, The Vector Institute, and Emeritus Professor, University of Toronto; and LeCun is Professor at New York University and VP and Chief AI Scientist, Facebook.

OTHER AWARDS

Shwetak Patel Receives 2018 ACM Prize in Computing

ACM has named Shwetak Patel the recipient of the 2018 ACM Prize in Computing for contributions to creative and practical sensing systems for sustainability and health. Patel and his students found highly creative ways to leverage existing infrastructure to make affordable and accurate monitoring a practical reality. Patel quickly turned his team’s research contributions into real-world deployments.

Patel is the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Endowed Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, where he directs the Ubicomp Lab, which develops innovative sensing systems for real-world applications in health, sustainability and novel interactions. He is also a director at Google working on healthcare.

Mendel Rosenblum Honored with Inaugural ACM Thacker Breakthrough Award

ACM has named Mendel Rosenblum of Stanford University the recipient of the inaugural ACM Charles P. “Chuck” Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award. He is being recognized for reinventing the virtual machine for the modern era and thereby revolutionizing datacenters and enabling modern cloud computing. Rosenblum is the DRC Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, and co-founder of VMware, a private company that developed many of the core technologies that underpin cloud computing today.

Elisa Bertino Named 2019-2020 ACM Athena Lecturer

ACM has named Elisa Bertino of Purdue University the 2019-2020 Athena Lecturer for pioneering and impactful contributions to data management and data security theory and systems, along with outstanding contributions to broadening participation in computing via professional leadership and mentoring. Bertino is the Samuel Conte Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University, where she also heads the Cyber Space Security Lab.

ACM Honors Computing Innovators Who Are Changing the World

ACM has named the recipients of four prestigious technical awards for 2018.

Gerald C. Combs is the recipient of theACM Software System Award for creating the Wireshark network protocol analyzer.

Constantinos Daskalakis and Michael J. Freedman are recipients of the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award. Daskalakis is recognized for his seminal contributions to the theory of computation and economics, particularly the complexity of Nash Equilibrium. Freedman is cited for the design and deployment of self-organizing geo-distributed systems.

Pavel Pevzner is the recipient of the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for pioneering contributions to the theory, design and implementation of algorithms for string reconstruction and to their applications in the assembly of genomes.

Henry Kautz is the recipient of the ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award for contributions to artificial intelligence and computational social science, including fundamental results on the complexity of inference, planning and media analytics for public health.

ACM Recognizes Outstanding Service to Computing Field

ACM has recognized four individuals with its 2018 awards for their exemplary service to the computing field.

Robert Sedgewick is the recipient of the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for developing classic textbooks and online materials for the study of algorithms, analytic combinatorics, and introductory computer science that have educated generations of students worldwide.

Victor Bahl is the recipient of the ACM Distinguished Service Award for significant and lasting service to the broad community of mobile and wireless networking, and for building strong linkages between academia, industry, and government agencies.

Meenakshi Balakrishnan is the recipient of the Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics for research, development, and deployment of cost-effective embedded-system and software solutions addressing mobility and education challenges of the visually impaired in the developing world.

Chris Stephenson is the recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Awardfor advancing CS education by architecting and nurturing the Computer Science Teachers Association to incorporate more than 22,000 K-12 CS educators and partners into the ACM community.

UC Berkeley Graduate Receives 2018 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award

Chelsea Finn of the University of California, Berkeley is the recipient of the 2018 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for her dissertation “Learning to Learn with Gradients.” In her thesis, Finn introduced algorithms for meta-learning that enable deep networks to solve new tasks from small datasets, and demonstrated how her algorithms can be applied in areas including computer vision, reinforcement learning and robotics.

Honorable Mentions for the award went to Ryan Beckett and Tengyu Ma, who both received PhD degrees in Computer Science from Princeton University.