The Association for Computing Machinery‘s (ACM) celebration of 50 years of the A.M. Turing Award is tomorrow and Saturday (June 23-24th, 2017) in San Francisco, CA. You can watch the live stream of the celebration here starting at 8:30 AM Pacific Time.  Day 1, Friday, June 23 Impact of Turing Recipients’ Work (8:55 – 9:15AM) Speaker: Barbara Liskov (2008 Turing laureate) Advances in Deep Neural Networks (9:15 – 10:30AM) Deep neural networks can be trained with relatively modest amounts of information and then successfully be applied to large quantities of unstructured data. Their capabilities, in some domains, rival those of human beings. How are deep neural networks changing our world and our jobs […]

The Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Bioengineering at Rice University, Lydia E. Kavraki, has been named the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2017-2018 Athena Lecturer. Each year, the Athena Lecturer award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. Kavraki has been cited for the invention of randomized motion-planning algorithms in robotics and the development of robotics-inspired methods for bioinformatics and biomedicine. From the ACM Press Release: Kavraki’s 1996 doctoral dissertation proposed the Probabilistic Roadmap Method (PRM), a technique to plan the motion of robots, which had been an enduring challenge in the field. The Probabilistic Roadmap Method was immediately hailed for its simple […]

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 […]

Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member Jennifer Rexford has been named the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2016-2017 Athena Lecturer. Each year, the Athena Lecturer award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. Rexford is the Gordon Y. S. Wu Professor in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. She has been cited for innovations that improved the efficiency of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) in routing Internet traffic, for laying the groundwork for software-defined networks (SDNs) and for contributions in measuring and engineering IP networks. These contributions greatly enhanced the stability and flow of Internet transmissions, and make data networks easier to design, understand and manage. […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) congratulates Whitfield Diffie, former Chief Security Officer of Sun Microsystems and Martin E. Hellman, Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University on receiving the 2015 ACM A.M. Turing Award for critical contributions to modern cryptography. Diffie and Hellman invented public key cryptography and digital signatures, the fundamental enablers of our digital society, as we know it today. By doing so they revolutionized our lives and launched the field of Modern Cryptography, a vibrant scientific area that elevated the art of code building into a serious mathematical discipline. The Diffie-Hellman Protocol protects daily Internet communications and trillions of dollars in financial transactions. Their influence has been […]

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has released their annual list of ACM Fellows. The 2015 ACM Fellows list recognizes 42 ACM members for their significant contributions to the development and application of computing in key computing fields including software research, data mining, computer graphics, computer and mobile systems, system security, multiprocessor and memory architecture design, and research in sensor networks. Whether they work in leading universities, corporations, or research laboratories, these newly minted ACM Fellows are responsible for the breakthroughs and industrial innovations that are transforming society at every level, explains ACM President Alexander L. Wolf. At times, the contributions of a Fellow may include enhancements to a device […]