Communications of the ACM
Liberty Science Center Bestows Genius Awards on Cerf, Bezos, Tartar
Jeff Bezos, Jill Tartar, and Vint Cerf recently received Genius Awards from the Liberty Science Center.
Credit: Liberty Science Center
Liberty Science Center recently bestowed Genius Awards on Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, Google Chief Internet Evangelist and former ACM president Vint Cerf, and Jill Tarter, astronomer with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI ) program.
Amazon's Bezos has played a key role in the growth of e-commerce. A graduate of Princeton University, he is also the founder of Blue Origin, a human spaceflight company. In 2013, he became the owner of The Washington Post. He was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 1999.
Cerf is widely regarded as the "Father of the Internet" for his work at Stanford University and at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the 1970s. His numerous honors include the U.S. National Medal of Technology, the ACM Alan M. Turing Award (which he shared with Robert Kahn in 2004), and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Tarter occupies the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, CA. In 2004, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world. She is responsible for coining the term "brown dwarf" for stars that lack sufficient mass to sustain hydrogen fusion.
Said Paul Hoffman, president and CEO of the Jersey City, NJ-based Liberty Science Center, "Our three 2015 Genius Award winners are singularly brilliant men and women. These out-of-the-box geniuses deserve to be honored in an out-of-the-box way."
The honorees generously volunteered their time in support of the Science Center’s mission to expose learners of all ages to the power, promise, and pure fun of science and technology. No honorariums were paid, and tickets for the awards gala started at $1,250 per person.
Liberty Science Center is a not-for-profit learning center located in Liberty State Park near the Statue of Liberty. Dedicated to bringing the power, promise, and pure fun of science to people of all ages, Liberty Science Center houses 12 museum exhibition halls, a live animal collection with 110 species, giant aquariums, a 3D theater, the nation’s largest IMAX Dome Theater, live simulcast surgeries, tornado and hurricane-force wind simulators, K-12 classrooms and labs, and teacher-development programs.
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