Communications of the ACM
Home/Magazine Archive/August 2004 (Vol. 47, No. 8)/2004 ACM Awards Banquet: a Night to Celebrate/Full Text
Communications of the ACM
2004 ACM Awards Banquet: a Night to Celebrate
The ACM Fellows Program was established in 1993 to recognize and honor outstanding ACM members for their achievements in CS and IT and for their significant contributions to the ACM mission. The 2003 Fellows inductees are from left, back row: Maria Klawe (ACM President), Peter Hart, Brent Hailpern, Victor Bahl, Elisa Bertino, Kathleen KcKeown, Barbara J. Grosz, Niraj Jha, and John White (ACM CEO). From left, front row: H.V. Jagadish, Dexter Kozen, John Carroll, Paul Hudak, Craig Partridge, and William Sanders. For a complete list of ACM Fellows, visit www.acm.org/awards/fellows.
ACM's most prestigious technical award, the A.M. Turing Award, was presented to Alan Kay, Hewlett-Packard Senior Fellow. He was honored "for pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary OO programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing."
Kay recalled many of the computing pioneers that inspired him throughout his professional career, quoting from among others the writings of Alan Turing.
Presenting Kay with the 2003 ACM A.M. Turing Award is ACM President Maria Klawe, ACM CEO John White (right), and David Tennenhouse (far right), Vice President of Intel's Corporate Technology Group and Director of Research. Financial support for the $100,000 Turing prize is provided by Intel Corporation.
The Software System Award was awarded to Stuart Feldman for Make. "There is probably no large software system in the world today that has not been processed by a version or offspring of Make." The $10,000 prize accompanying this award is financially supported by IBM.
Gary Miller, of Carnegie Mellon University, accepted the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award and $5,000 prize for co-recipients Michael Rabin (Harvard), Robert Solovay (University of California at Berkeley), and Volker Strassen (University of Konstanz, Germany). They were honored "for the development of efficient randomized tests of primality, enabling the practical realization of public key cryptography and demonstrating the power of randomized algorithms."
The 2003 ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award was presented to two computer scientists who have made theoretical and methodological contributions whose widespread adoption changed the scientific world beyond computer science and engineering. The $10,000 award is supported by AAAI and individual contributions.
David Haussler, University of California at Santa Cruz, was honored for "contributions bridging computer science and biology through research in computational learning theory, computational biology, and bioinformatics leading to major influences on the understanding of biological macromolecules and the investigation of the human genome."
Judea Pearl, University of California at Los Angeles, was honored "for contributions to AI and its applications, building a firm mathematical and theoretical foundation through groundbreaking work in heuristic search, reasoning under uncertainty, constraint processing, non-monotonic reasoning, and causal modeling." Pearl dedicated the award to his son, Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter killed by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002, noting he will donate its proceeds to the Daniel Pearl Foundation established to promote cross-cultural understanding.
The Grace Murray Hopper Award and accompanying $5,000 prize, honoring outstanding young computing professionals (under 35), was presented by Maria Klawe and John White (right) to Stephen W. Keckler, University of Texas at Austin.
Patrick Ball, of the Benetech Initiative, was the recipient of Eugene Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics. Ball, who received a $5,000 prize, was cited for his leadership in the creation of Analyzer and Martus, the open source software that enables human rights groups to securely collect, safeguard, organize, disseminate, and conduct statistical analysis of human rights abuses.
Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award went to Sartaj Sahni "for outstanding contributions to computing education through inspired teaching, development of courses and curricula for distance education, and authoring significant textbooks in several areas." The award is accompanied by a $5,000 prize from Prentice-Hall Publishing.
Ruzena Bajcsy, University of California at Berkeley, won the Distinguished Service Award for "outstanding contributions to computer science, IT, and societal systems as a researcher, educator, and administrator."
Mark Scott Johnson was named the 2003 recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award. He was cited for his effective service during the past two decades through ACM activities in SIGPLAN, SIG Governing Board, and Council.
The ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award went to AnHai Doan, University of Illinois, for his dissertation Learning to Map between Structured Representations of Data. (Doan was nominated by the University of Washington.) Dina Katabi, MIT, and Subhash Khot, Princeton, were cited as honorable mentions in this category.
Finalists from this year's ACM Student Research Competition were recognized at the Awards banquet for their winning research contributions. From left: John White (ACM CEO), Mark Lewin (Microsoft Research, SRC sponsor), Maria Klawe (ACM President), Michael Piatek (undergraduate category, Duquesne University), Michael Swift (first place, University of Washington), T.J. Giuli (second place, Stanford University), Petros Maniatis (second place, Stanford University), Xinyuan Wang (third place, North Carolina State University), and Ann Sobel (coordinator of the 2004 SRC).
Winning team members of the 2004 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest from St. Petersburg University of Information Technology, Mechanics and Optics were also in attendance. From left: Sergey Orshanskiy, Vladimir Parfenov (NEER contest director), Bill Poucher (ICPC Executive Director), Pavel Mavrin, Andrew Stankevich (team coach), and Dmitri Pavlov.
Outgoing President Maria Klawe welcomes newly elected ACM President David Patterson to the annual award banquet at the Plaza Hotel, New York City.
For more information about the award winners, see www.acm.org/awards/award_winners.2003.html and for more pictures of the banquet see the July issue of MemberNet; campus.acm.org/public/membernet.
©2004 ACM 0002-0782/04/0800 $5.00
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.
The Digital Library is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2004 ACM, Inc.
No entries found