About ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award

The Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award honors specific theoretical accomplishments that have had a significant and demonstrable effect on the practice of computing. ThIs award is accompanied by a prize of $10,000 and is endowed by contributions from the Kanellakis family, with additional financial support provided by ACM's Special Interest Groups on Algorithms and Computational Theory (SIGACT), Design Automation (SIGDA), Management of Data (SIGMOD), and Programming Languages (SIGPLAN), the ACM SIG Projects Fund, and individual contributions.

 

Recent Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award News

Inventors of BW-transform and the FM-index Receive Kanellakis Award

Michael Burrows, Google; Paolo Ferragina, University of Pisa; and Giovanni Manzini, University of Pisa, receive the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for inventing the BW-transform and the FM-index that opened and influenced the field of Compressed Data Structures with fundamental impact on Data Compression and Computational Biology. In 1994, Burrows and his late coauthor David Wheeler published their paper describing revolutionary data compression algorithm—the “Burrows-Wheeler Transform” (BWT). A few years later, Ferragina and Manzini showed that it was possible to build a “compressed index,” later called the FM-index. The introduction of the BW Transform and the development of the FM-index have had a profound impact on the theory of algorithms and data structures with fundamental advancements.

2022 ACM Paris Kanellakis Award recipients Michael Burrows, Paolo Ferragina, and Giovanni Manzini

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