The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced the recipients of four prestigious technical awards. These innovators were selected by their peers for making significant contributions that enable the computing field to solve real-world challenges. The awards reflect achievements in cryptography, network coding systems, computer-human interaction, and software systems.
One of the awardees is former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Eric Horvitz, who is the recipient of the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award for his contributions to artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. This award is presented to individuals selected for career contributions that have breadth within computer science, or that bridge computer science and other disciplines.
From the ACM Press Release:
[Horvitz’s] contributions have advanced the understanding of how computing systems can reflect about their own reasoning and about the goals and cognition of people. He showed how these methods can enable people and machines to work closely together as coordinated teams to solve problems, taking advantage of the complementarities of human and machine intelligence. Horvitz has played a leadership role in the development and fielding of practical applications including intelligent cloud services that make predictions about road traffic patterns and provide ideal route directions; computational models that assist physicians with decisions about such outcomes as readmissions and infections; methods that allocate resources within operating systems; and techniques for prioritizing, filtering, and interpreting email. Horvitz is a technical fellow at Microsoft Research and a past president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). He is a fellow of ACM, AAAI, and the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).
The other 2015 ACM award winners include:
- Richard Stallman, recipient of the ACM Software System Award for the development and leadership of GCC (GNU Compiler Collection), which has enabled extensive software and hardware innovation, and has been a lynchpin of the free software movement.
- Brent Waters, recipient of the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for the introduction and development of the concepts of attribute-based encryption and functional encryption. Waters is an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
- Michael Luby, recipient of the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for groundbreaking contributions to erasure correcting codes, which are essential for improving the quality of video transmission over the Internet. Luby is a vice president of technology at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, and an ACM Fellow.
See the ACM press release to learn more.
