Written by Shar Steed, originally posted on the The CRA Bulletin. The University of Washington (UW) Allen School recently shared the story behind the creation of a new professorship honoring Ed Lazowska in recognition of his incredible impact on the computing research community. The Endowed Professorship in Computer Science & Engineering in Honor of Edward D. Lazowska was the brainchild of Peter Lee of Microsoft and Jeff Dean of Google, who teamed up with Lee’s Microsoft colleagues Harry Shum and Brad Smith to provide a $1M gift. From the UW announcement: “If you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.” That maxim once graced the top of Allen […]

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters recently announced the award of the 2021 Abel Prize going to matematician László Lovász (Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics and Eötvös Loránd University) and computer scientist Avi Wigderson (Princeton University) “for their foundational contributions to theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, and their leading role in shaping them into central fields of modern mathematics.”   Starting in 2003, the Abel Prize is a distinguished award given to members of the scientific community to recognize outstanding work and contributions to the field of mathematics. Nominations are reviewed by the ‘Abel Committee’ consisting of five mathematicians to determine a winner. Lovász and Wigderson’s award-winning work […]

The Herbert A. Simon Award is presented to researchers who have made important lifetime contributions to the field of complex systems science. It is named in memory of Herbert A. Simon for his pioneering work on complex systems, artificial intelligence, information processing, decision-making, problem-solving, and organization theory. The award ceremony is held during the International Conference on Complex Systems. In 2020, the Award will be presented to Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Melanie Mitchell for her prolific contributions to complex systems science and artificial intelligence. Prof. Mitchell is the Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, and Professor of Computer Science (currently on leave) at Portland State University. Her […]

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 […]

Congratulations to Benjamin Recht, assistant professor of electrical engineering, computer science, and statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, for receiving the 2015 William O. Baker Award for Initiatives in Research in the field of statistics and machine learning. From the website: Recht is being honored for his significant contributions to the field of data science, an area of research that combines statistics (the analysis of large amounts of numerical data), computer science, and mathematics. A common problem in the modern world is that there is lots of data but it is usually incomplete. Recht’s work has been particularly valuable in a broad area of mathematics that uses assumptions to reconstruct data—matrix completion […]