ACM Awards

Dan Garcia, Teaching Professor, UC Berkeley, and Brian Harvey, Teaching Professor Emeritus, UC Berkeley, receive the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for their advocacy of and advances in education to bring the beauty and joy of computing to all students, especially those from historically underrepresented communities. Together Garcia and Harvey have been instrumental in expanding computer science education, most notably through the development of the Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) curriculum, which began as a national pilot for the CSforALL movement. 

Manish Parashar, Professor, University of Utah, receives the ACM Distinguished Service Award for service and leadership in furthering the transformative impact of computer and computational science on science and engineering. Parashar’s record of service includes leadership at the National Science Foundation (NSF), where he developed NSF’s strategic vision for a national cyberinfrastructure, as well as at the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), where he developed the Future Advancement Computing Ecosystem Strategic Plan (FACE). 

Judith Gal-Ezer, Professor Emerita, Open University of Israel, receives the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award in recognition of her sustained contributions to computer science education policy and research and, more broadly, to the ACM Europe Council.Gal-Ezer has been an internationally recognized leader in computing education. For her accomplishments, she has received the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award as well as the ACM SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education. Gal-Ezer has been very active in the ACM Europe Council and its sub-committees.

Peter Stone, Professor, University of Texas at Austin and Chief Scientist, Sony AI, receives the ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award for significant contributions to the theory and practice of artificial intelligence (AI), especially in reinforcement learning, multiagent systems, transfer learning, and intelligent robotics. As a leading figure in AI research, Stone has fundamentally advanced how autonomous agents learn, plan, and collaborate. His groundbreaking work on reinforcement learning algorithms has enabled robots to acquire skills through experience.

William Gropp, University of Illinois; Pavan Balaji, Meta; Rajeev Thakur, Yanfei Guo, Kenneth Raffenetti, and Hui Zhou (all of Argonne National Laboratory), receive the ACM Software System Award for MPICH , which has powered 30 years of progress in computational science and engineering by providing scalable, robust, and portable communication software for parallel computers. The development of the MPICH software system began in 1992 as proof-of-concept for the emerging Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. 

Hugo Krawczyk, Senior Principal Scientist, Amazon, receives the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for pioneering and lasting contributions to the theoretical foundations of cryptographically secure communications, and to the protocols that form the security foundations of the Internet. Krawczyk’s most high-profile contribution is his work on the SIGMA authenticated key-exchange protocol. SIGMA has become a cornerstone of the most widely used communication protocols on the Internet. It is now implemented in billions of devices and web browsers, making it a fundamental component of online security.

ACM has named Cordelia Schmid, Research Director at Inria, the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology, as the 2025-2026 ACM Athena Lecturer. Schmid is recognized for outstanding contributions to computer vision in image retrieval, object recognition, and video understanding. Her work has helped computers understand, perceive, and interact with the visual world. In keeping with the Athena Lecturer Award’s goal of honoring both technical and service contributions, Schmid is recognized for building an active research community. Her skills in mentorship and supervision are also renowned among her peers.

ACM has named Jason Cong, the holder of the Volgenau Chair for Engineering Excellence at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, as the recipient of the 2024 ACM Charles P. “Chuck” Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award. Cong is recognized for fundamental contributions to the design and automation of field-programmable systems and customizable computing. During his career in both academia and industry, Cong developed an extraordinary array of tools to automate integrated circuit design FPGAs.

ACM has named Rachid Guerraoui the recipient of the inaugural ACM Luiz André Barroso Award for theoretical and applied contributions to distributed computing and impactful work on promoting computer science in Africa. He has made groundbreaking contributions that have shaped the landscape of distributed computing, provided new insights into managing transactions in concurrent environments, and has provided tools and frameworks for understanding and optimizing transaction performance. Guerraoui is a Professor in the School of Computer and Communications Sciences at EPFL, where he is also Director of the Distributed Computing Laboratory. The award was established to recognize researchers from historically underrepresented communities who have made fundamental contributions to computer science.

ACM has named 55 members ACM Fellows for significant contributions in areas including computer graphics, cybersecurity, human-computer interaction, data management, machine learning, artificial intelligence, algorithms, visualization, and many more. The ACM Fellows program recognizes the top 1% of ACM Members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community.

ACM has named 56 Distinguished Members for outstanding contributions to the field. All 2024 inductees are longstanding ACM members and were selected by their peers for significant technical achievements as well as volunteer service to their professional community. The ACM Distinguished Member program recognizes up to 10 percent of ACM worldwide membership based on professional experience and significant achievements in computing.

 Wen-mei Hwu, a Senior Distinguished Research Scientist at NVIDIA and Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is the recipient of the ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award. Hwu is recognized for pioneering and foundational contributions to the design and adoption of multiple generations of processor architectures. His fundamental and pioneering contributions have had a broad impact on three generations of processor architectures: superscalar, VLIW, and throughput-oriented manycore processors (GPUs).

An eight-member research team has been awarded the 2024 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for their project, “Breaking the Million-Electron and 1 EFLOP/s Barriers: Biomolecular-Scale Ab Initio Molecular Dynamics Using MP2 Potentials.”  The Gordon Bell Prize is awarded each year to recognize outstanding achievement in high-performance computing. The purpose of the award is to track the progress over time of parallel computing, with particular emphasis on rewarding innovation in applying high-performance computing to applications in science, engineering, and large-scale data analytics.

 ACM presented a 12-member team with the  ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling for their project, “Boosting Earth System Model Outputs And Saving PetaBytes in Their Storage Using Exascale Climate Emulators.” ACM established the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling in 2023 to recognize the contributions of climate scientists and software engineers applying high-performance computing to climate modelling applications. Climate scientists and software engineers are evaluated for the award based on the performance and innovation in their computational methods.

John M. Abowd, Professor Emeritus, Cornell University, and Chief Scientist, United States Census Bureau (retired), receives the ACM Policy Award for transformative work in modernizing the US Census Bureau’s processing and dissemination of census and survey data, which serves as a model for privacy-aware management of government collected data. Abowd’s work has transformed the government’s capacity to improve the accuracy and availability of vital statistical and data resources, while at the same time, enhancing citizens’ privacy.

Ke Fan of the University of Illinois at Chicago and Daniel Nichols of the University of Maryland are the 2024 ACM-IEEE CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship recipients.The George Michael Memorial Fellowship honors exceptional PhD students throughout the world whose research focus is high-performance computing (HPC) applications, networking, storage, or large-scale data analytics. The Fellowships will be formally presented at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC24).

ACM has named David A. Padua, Donald Biggar Willett Professor Emeritus of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the recipient of the 2024 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award. The Ken Kennedy Award recognizes groundbreaking achievements in parallel and high performance computing. Padua is cited for innovative and usable contributions to the theory and practice of parallel compilation and tools, as well as service to the computing community. The award will be formally presented at The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC24).

ACM named Princeton University's Margaret Martonosi the recipient of the 2023 ACM Frances E. Allen Award for Outstanding Mentoring. Martonosi is recognized for outstanding and far-reaching mentoring at Princeton University, in computer architecture, and to the broader computer science community. Martonosi, the Hugh Trumbull Adams ’35 Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, is a leader in the design, modeling, and verification of power efficient computer architecture. She also recently served as the National Science Foundation Assistant Director leading the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering.