Milestones | DOI: 10.1145/1965724.1965733
ACM Award Recipients
Craig Gentry, Kurt Mehlhorn, and other computer
scientists are honored for their research and service.
ACm reCentLy AnnOunCeD the winners of six presti- gious awards for innova- tions in computing tech- nology that have led to
practical solutions to a wide range of
challenges facing commerce, education, and society.
Craig Gentry, a researcher at IBM,
was awarded the Grace Murray Hopper
Award for his breakthrough construction of a fully homomorphic encryption scheme, which enables computations to be performed on encrypted
data without unscrambling it. This
long-unsolved mathematical puzzle
requires immense computational effort, but Gentry’s innovative approach
broke the theoretical barrier to this
puzzle by double encrypting the data
in such a way that unavoidable errors
could be removed without detection.
Kurt Mehlhorn, founding director of the Max Planck Institute for
Informatics and a professor at Saarland University, was awarded the
Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice
Award for contributions to algorithm
engineering that led to creation of the
Library of Efficient Data Types and
Algorithms (LEDA). This software collection of data structures and algorithms, which Mehlhorn developed
with Stefan Näher, provides practical
solutions for problems that had previously impeded progress in computer
graphics, computer-aided geometric
design, scientific computation, and
computational biology.
GroupLens Collaborative Filtering
Recommender Systems received the
ACM Software System Award. These
systems show how a distributed set
of users could receive personalized
recommendations by sharing ratings,
leading to both commercial products
and extensive research. Based on automated collaborative filtering, these
recommender systems were introduced, refined, and commercialized
IBM researcher Craig Gentry, recipient of the
Grace Murray hopper Award.
by a team at GroupLens. The team
then brought automation to the process, enabling wide-ranging research
and commercial applications. The
GroupLens team includes John Riedl,
University of Minnesota; Paul Resn-ick, University of Michigan; Joseph
A. Konstan, University of Minnesota;
Neophytos Iacovou, COVOU Technologists; Peter Bergstrom, Fluke Thermography; Mitesh Suchak, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; David
Maltz, Microsoft; Brad Miller, Luther
College; Jon Herlocker, VMware, Inc.;
Lee Gordon, Gordon Consulting, LLC;
Sean McNee, FTI Consulting, Inc.; and
Shyong (Tony) K. Lam, University of
Minnesota.
Takeo Kanade, the U.A. and Helen
Whitaker University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics at Carnegie
Mellon University, is the recipient of
the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award for
contributions to research in computer vision and robotics. His approach
balanced fundamental theoretical insights with practical, real-world appli-
cations in areas like face and motion
detection and analysis, direct drive manipulators, three-dimensional shape
recovery from both stereo vision and
motional analysis, and video surveillance and monitoring.
Barbara Ericson, who directs the
Institute for Computing Education at
Georgia Tech, and Mark Guzdial, director of the Contextualized Support
for Learning at Georgia Tech, received
the Karl V. Karlstom Outstanding Educator Award for their contributions to
broadening participation in computing. They created the Media Computation (MediaComp) approach, which
motivates students to write programs
that manipulate and create digital media, such as pictures, sounds, and videos. Now in use in almost 200 schools
around the world, MediaComp’s contextualized approach to introductory
computer science attracts students
not motivated by classical algorithmic
problems addressed in traditional CS
education.
Reinhard Wilhelm and Joseph S.
DeBlasi were named recipients of the
Distinguished Service Award. Wilhelm,
scientific director of the Schloss Dag-stuhl–Leibniz Center for Informatics,
was honored for two decades of exceptional service at the center, creating a
stimulating environment for advancing research in informatics. Wilhelm
brought together researchers from
complementary computing areas for
intensive workshops that promoted
new research collaborations and directions. DeBlasi, former executive director of ACM, was honored for his executive leadership from 1989–1999 that
transformed ACM into a financially
sound, globally respected institution,
and for his foresight in implementing
programs and expanding international initiatives that continue to sustain
ACM today.
© 2011 acM 0001-0782/11/07 $10.00
Photogra Ph By steVe Moors for technology reVIe W