Zvi Meir Kedem

The ACM Outstanding Contribution Award is presented to ACM Fellow Zvi Kedem in recognition for his leadership as Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Computing Classification System (CCS) 2012 Update Project. The CCS has been the de facto standard taxonomy for the computing field for over 50 years. The last major overhaul of the CCS was released in January 1982 under the leadership of Jean E. Sammet and Anthony Ralston. After four minor updates in (the last in 1998), in 2011 Kedem undertook a massive project to revise and automate the CCS, rebuilding it as a modern cognitive map of the computing field.

He delineated 13 subject areas, which defined the nature of work teams for developing those areas. He recruited 13 team leaders, who in turn recruited 134 subject domain experts, including among them 39 ACM Fellows and three ACM Distinguished Members. He coordinated the year-long efforts of this expansive pool of talent in critiquing and thoroughly revising an initial draft of the new CCS which had been generated by an ACM contractor with expertise in developing ontologies using automated methods. With Zvi Kedem's broad knowledge of the computing space, he was able to resolve thorny conceptual differences among the team leaders.

The CCS is a unique and key component of the search index infrastructure underlying the ACM Digital Library and ACM Guide to Computing Literature. In providing a structured set of computing concepts, it enables discovery of both topic-specific works and of people with subject-specific expertise. The CCS infrastructure is now in place and its effects will be seen throughout the ACM Digital Library, in Citation Pages for individual works, in ACM Author Profiles, and in all aggregated views of the field, including Institutional Profiles, Conference and Journal views, and descriptions of ACM Special Interest Groups.