The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) continues to roll out its annual awards, today naming William Wulf the recipient of its 2011 Distinguished Service Award and Seth Cooper its 2011 Doctoral Dissertation Award. Wulf is being recognized for his service as both the Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the President of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Cooper is receiving his honor for his groundbreaking work exploring the use of video games for solving difficult scientific problems. According to the ACM press release:

Congratulations to Luis von Ahn, Hanan Samet, Hal Abelson, and Stephanie Forrest, who today were named recipients of four prestigious awards issued by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The awards, which honor the recipients for the significant contributions that they have made to enable computer science to solve real-world challenges, “reflect achievements in human-computer interaction, computer science education, geographical information science, and computer simulation for biological research.” According to ACM’s press release:

The Association for Computing Machinery’s Council on Women in Computing (ACM-W) yesterday named MIT’s Nancy Lynch its 2012-13 Athena Lecturer, recognizing Lynch for her advances in distributed systems enabling dependable Internet and wireless network applications. The Athena Lecturer award, which comes with a $10,000 honorarium provided by Google, “celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science.” According to the press release: “Lynch’s work has influenced both theoreticians and practitioners,” said Mary Jane Irwin, who heads the ACM-W Athena Lecturer award committee. “Her ability to formulate many of the core problems of the field in clear and precise ways has provided a foundation that allows computer system designers to find ways […]

Congratulations to Sanjeev Arora, the Charles C. Fitzmorris Professor of Computer Science at Princeton, who yesterday was named the recipient of the 2011 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences for his “contributions to computational complexity, algorithms, and optimization that have reshaped our understanding of computation.” According to an ACM–Infosys press release: Arora’s research revolutionized the approach to essentially unsolvable problems that have long bedeviled the computing field, the so-called NP-complete problems. These results have had implications for problems common to cryptography, computational biology, and computer vision, among other fields [more following the link].  

Hot off the press from ACM this morning: ACM has named Judea Pearl of the University of California, Los Angeles the winner of the 2011 ACM A.M. Turing Award for innovations that enabled remarkable advances in the partnership between humans and machines that is the foundation of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Pearl pioneered developments in probabilistic and causal reasoning and their application to a broad range of problems and challenges. He created a computational foundation for processing information under uncertainty, a core problem faced by intelligent systems. He also developed graphical methods and symbolic calculus that enable machines to reason about actions and observations, and to assess cause-effect relationships from empirical findings. […]

For the first time in the 37-year history of the distinguished honor, the National Science Foundation (NSF) today named two individuals — both computer scientists — as joint recipients of the 2012 Alan T. Waterman Award. Scott Aaronson of MIT and Robert Wood of Harvard were honored with the award, recognizing “an outstanding young researcher in any field of science or engineering” supported by NSF. Also for the first time, both Aaronson and Wood will receive $1 million grants over a five-year period to further their research, up from $500,000 awards in recent years. Aaronson was selected for his research on the limitations of quantum computers and computational complexity theory more generally. Wood received […]