ACM President Adele Goldberg (1985)
Citation

For his outstanding leadership and contributions to computer science that have provided major advances in the computing field.

During his tenure at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense, Dr. Kahn provided strong and imaginative leadership for one of the most wide-ranging and important research programs in computer science, computer-communications, and artificial intelligence. In the past two years, Dr. Kahn was instrumental in the establishment of the Strategic Computing Initiative, a DoD program that has far-reaching implications in the development of future generations of information technology.