About ACM Athena Lecturer Award
This award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to Computer Science. Each year ACM honors a preeminent woman computer scientist as the Athena Lecturer. The recipient gives an invited talk at a major ACM conference of her choice. A video of the talk is made available on the ACM website. The award carries a cash prize of $25,000. Financial support for the Athena Lecturer Award is provided by Two Sigma.
Recent Athena Lecturer Award News
Background
Maja J. Matarić is the Chan Soon-Shiong Chair and Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, where she is the founding director of the USC Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center. She is also a Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind.
A graduate of the University of Kansas, Matarić earned an SM in Computer Science and a PhD in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from MIT. Her many publications cover a wide range of topics, including distributed robotics, robot learning, human-robot interaction, and socially assistive robotics, and are highly cited (h-index 105; over 45600 citations) .
Matarić is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AMACAD), and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), IEEE and ACM, and recipient of the US Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Math, and Engineering Mentoring.
2024-2025 ACM Athena Lecturer
New York, NY, May 22, 2024 – ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today named Maja Matarić, the Chan Soon-Shiong Chair and Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California , as the 2024-2025 ACM Athena Lecturer. Matarić, who is also a Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind, is recognized for pioneering the field of socially assistive robotics, including groundbreaking research, evaluation, and technology transfer, and foundational work in multi-robot coordination and human-robot interaction. Initiated in 2006, the ACM Athena Lecturer Award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science.
Autonomous Cognition and Collaborative and Distributed Robotics
Maja Matarić made fundamental contributions to autonomous cognition and interaction. Her early work was the first to demonstrate that behavior-based systems (BBS) could be endowed with representation and have the expressive power to plan and learn. Her well-known system, Toto, was the first BBS to learn maps online and optimize its behavior. It is highly cited and remains a milestone in robot control. Matarić pioneered distributed algorithms for scalable control of robot teams and swarms, enabling robot teams to collaborate on tasks including formations, exploration, and foraging. Prior to her work, nearly all research was restricted to single robots or pairs. Her pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of multi-robot coordination showed that complex collective behaviors could be composed of basis behaviors in a principled way, bringing rigor to the then nascent discipline of distributed robotics. Her work on distributed robotics and multi-robot coordination and learning is the first to provide formal analysis of robot coordination approaches, elucidating formal and practical limitations, then contributing provably correct yet scalable multi-robot task allocation algorithms.
Socially Assistive Robotics
Matarić co-pioneered and her lab named the field of socially assistive robotics (SAR). SAR focuses on assistive human-robot interaction (HRI) enabling machines to help through social rather than physical support. It aims to gain novel insights into human behavior through human-machine interaction and to develop systems that provide personalized assistive HRI in convalescence, rehabilitation, therapy, training, and education. Matarić’s work has developed innovative HRI and SAR methods that modeled user engagement, personality, group moderation, and persuasive interaction dynamics in complex and uncertain real-world environments. Her work is known for extensive evaluation studies in real-world settings (schools, rehabilitation centers, homes) with users with challenges, including in post-stroke rehabilitation, cognitive and social skills training for children with autism spectrum disorders, cognitive and physical exercise for elderly users and Alzheimer’s patients, study support for students with ADHD, and therapy support for students with anxiety.
Mentoring
Matarić has been a strong mentor and advocate for underrepresented groups. She has mentored early career women via CRA-W and helped to place large numbers of women and members of other underrepresented groups in graduate programs and faculty positions. Since 2019 she has also led USC Viterbi’s K-12 STEM Outreach Program, which included sending out students and faculty to mentor students in surrounding, largely low-income schools around Los Angeles, and running classes and workshops for high school teachers on campus at USC. Her book, The Robotics Prime, is geared toward K-12 students and undergraduates. The book explains both the principals of robots and offers a practical guide to building programmable hands-on robots.
2023-2024 ACM Athena Lecturer
New York, NY, April 26, 2023 – ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today named Margo Seltzer, a Professor at the University of British Columbia, as the 2023-2024 ACM Athena Lecturer. Seltzer is recognized for foundational research in file and storage systems, pioneering research in data provenance, impactful software contributions in Berkeley DB, and tireless dedication to service and mentoring. Initiated in 2006, the ACM Athena Lecturer Award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science.
Database Software
In 1992, while studying at the University of California at Berkeley, Seltzer, along with Keith Bostic and Mike Olson, introduced BerkeleyDB, a database software library. Berkeley DB underpinned a range of first-generation Internet services including account management, mail servers, and online trading platforms. This software has been a part of many popular operating systems including Linux, FreeBSD, Apple's OSX, and the GNU standard C library (glibc). Originally developed as an open-source library, Seltzer and Bostic founded Sleepycat Software in 1996 to continue the development of Berkeley DB and provide commercial support. Berkeley DB was an early and influential example of the NoSQL movement and pioneered the "dual license" approach to software licensing.
Data Provenance and Log-Structured File Systems
Seltzer later pioneered whole-system data provenance, a paradigm that provides system support for assessing the quality of information by understanding where the data comes from, who is using the data, and how it was obtained. Her research demonstrated how provenance could be practically supported at the system level to implement important applications in security and compliance. Her subsequent work focused on applications of provenance, including intrusion detection, data loss prevention and attack attribution, and computational reproducibility.
She is also known for her careful and nuanced work in log-structured file systems, where she adapted various approaches for use in the UNIX file systems and updates of file system metadata.
Teaching and Service
Seltzer has received several awards for excellence in teaching and leadership for her work broadening participation in computer science. She is deeply involved in mentoring, and several of her former students have become leaders in academia and industry. She has served as program chair for conferences in systems and databases and serves on numerous advisory boards for scientific and national boards.
“To be selected for the ACM Athena Award, a candidate must pass a very high bar,” said ACM President Yannis Ioannidis. “She must be a person who has both made fundamental technical contributions and impacted the computing community through service. Margo Seltzer not only meets these criteria but sets the bar extremely high. Regarding the former, her work on Berkeley DB and data provenance has broken new ground and has been very impactful in the data management and systems communities, both in academia and industry. Regarding the latter, in addition to her teaching and mentoring awards, she is known for her efforts to broaden participation in computer science among traditionally underrepresented groups. When considering all that Margo is involved in, one question that comes to mind is ‘Where does she find the time?’ Having overlapped with her at Harvard for a year, I think I have the answer: `She doesn’t find it. She creates it!’ We congratulate Margo Seltzer on being named the ACM Athena Lecturer and we look forward to celebrating her work at the ACM Awards Banquet.”
Seltzer will be formally presented with the ACM Athena Lecturer Award at the annual ACM Awards Banquet, which will be held this year on Saturday, June 10 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The ACM Athena Lecturer Award carries a cash prize of $25,000, with financial support provided by Two Sigma.
Background
Margo Seltzer is the Canada 150 Research Chair and the Cheriton Family Chair in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. She is also the Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Seltzer earned a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, and an AB degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard/Radcliffe College. She has authored more than 194 publications on a wide range of topics related to computer systems including systems for capturing and accessing data provenance, file systems, databases, and storage.
Her honors include receiving the UBC CS Awesome Instructor Award, the ACM SIGMOD Systems Award, the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award, the CRA-E Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award, and the ACM Software System Award (for BerkeleyDB), among many others. She is a Fellow of ACM, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering.
2022-2023 ACM Athena Lecturer
ACM named Éva Tardos, a Professor at Cornell University, as the 2022-2023 ACM Athena Lecturer. Tardos is recognized for fundamental research contributions to combinatorial optimization, approximation algorithms, and algorithmic game theory, and for her dedicated mentoring and service to these communities. Initiated in 2006, the ACM Athena Lecturer Award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science.
Tardos is one of the most influential leaders in the field of theoretical computer science. Her impact spans deriving deep theoretical results, shaping new research areas, and influencing a broad range of applications. Her key contributions in combinatorial optimization include the first strongly polynomial-time algorithm for the minimum-cost flow problem (for which she received the Fulkerson Prize) and a general framework for fast approximation of packing and covering linear programs.
She developed fundamental approximation algorithms, developing new algorithmic techniques for the use of linear programming and rounding in network design problems. The applications of her work include solving problems in facility location, network routing, and the spread of influence in social networks. Tardos also played a key role in founding the field of algorithmic game theory by developing algorithms in the presence of self-interested agents that are governed by incentives and economic constraints.
Her pioneering work using game-theoretic ideas to quantify the performance gaps between centrally managed network traffic and the flow of traffic directed by self-interested agents (selfish routing) was recognized with the Gödel Prize. She subsequently developed new approaches to analyzing dynamic games and new algorithms for mechanism design including composable ones.
Tardos is an outstanding educator, mentor, and leader in her scientific community. She has received awards for excellence in teaching and leadership for her work supporting women in computer science, and several of her former students are now prominent figures in the field. She co-authored one of the leading textbooks used in undergraduate computer science, Algorithm Design, and co-edited Algorithmic Game Theory, a significant book at the intersection of economics and computation.
“Each year ACM honors a preeminent woman computer scientist as the Athena Lecturer,” said ACM President Gabriele Kotsis. “Athena Lecturers are recognized for both enduring technical contributions, as well as their community service and mentoring. Éva Tardos has played a central role in shaping the field of algorithms over three decades, and she has been one of the foremost authorities in the emerging field of algorithmic game theory. Her work, her generosity to younger colleagues, and her service to the wider field have been outstanding. We look forward to presenting her with this award and we know she will continue to make contributions for years to come.”
Tardos will be formally presented with the ACM Athena Lecturer Award at the annual ACM Awards Banquet, which will be held this year on Saturday, June 11 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The ACM Athena Lecturer Award carries a cash prize of $25,000, with financial support provided by Two Sigma.
Background
Éva Tardos is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Science and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. Earlier in her career at Cornell, she held posts including Associate Dean for Diversity & Inclusion, and Diversity Lead for Computing and Information Sciences.
Tardos earned Diploma and Ph.D. degrees in Mathematics from Eӧtvӧs University, Budapest, and later earned a Candidate degree from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She has authored more than 100 publications on topics including approximation algorithms, mathematical optimization, algorithms, network planning and design, and theoretical computer science.
Her honors include receiving the IEEE John von Neumann Medal, the Fulkerson Prize, the George B. Dantzig Prize, the Van Wijngaarden Award, and the Gödel Prize. She is a Fellow of ACM, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and the Game Theory Society. She has also been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Arts and Science.
2021-2022 ACM Athena Lecturer
ACM named Ayanna Howard, dean of The Ohio State University College of Engineering, as the 2021-2022 ACM Athena Lecturer. Howard is recognized for fundamental contributions to the development of accessible human-robotic systems and artificial intelligence, along with forging new paths to broaden participation in computing through entrepreneurial and mentoring efforts. Her contributions span theoretical foundations, experimental evaluation, and practical applications.
Howard is a leading roboticist, entrepreneur, and educator whose research includes dexterous manipulation, robot learning, field robotics, and human-robot interaction. She is a leader in studying the overtrust that people place in robots in various autonomous decision-making settings. In addition to her stellar research record, Howard has a strong record of service that demonstrates her commitment to advancing the field and broadening participation.
“Ayanna Howard is a trailblazer in vital research areas, including topics such as trust and bias in AI, which will continue to be front-and-center in society in the coming years,” said ACM President Gabriele Kotsis. “The quality of her research has made her a thought leader in developing accessible human-robot interaction systems. Both as an entrepreneur and mentor, Ayanna Howard has worked to increase the participation of women and underrepresented groups in computing. For all these reasons, she is precisely the kind of leader ACM seeks to recognize with the Athena Lecturer Award.”
Initiated in 2006, the ACM Athena Lecturer Award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. The award carries a cash prize of $25,000, with financial support provided by Two Sigma. The Athena Lecturer gives an invited talk at a major ACM conference of her choice.
KEY TECHNICAL CONTRIBUTIONS
Robotic Manipulation
Her doctoral research on dexterous robotic manipulation of deformable objects proposed some of the first ideas on the modeling of deformable objects via physical simulation, such that they could be robustly grasped by robot arms. This work also demonstrated how neural networks could be trained to extract the minimum force required for subsequent deformable object manipulation tasks.
Terrain Classification of Field Robots
Terrain classification is critical for many robots operating in unstructured natural field environments, including navigating the Arctic or determining safe landing locations on the surface of Mars. Howard’s work introduced fuzzy logic methods to model environmental uncertainty that advanced the state of the art in field robotics, including finding evidence of never-before-observed life on Antarctica’s sea floor.
Robotics for Children with Special Needs
Howard studied the ways in which socially-effective robots could improve the access and scalability of services for children with special needs, as well as potentially improve outcomes through the engaging nature of robots. In adapting her contributions to real-world settings for assistive technology for children, her work has also provided first-of-its-kind computer vision techniques that analyze the movement of children to devise therapeutic measures.
Overtrust in Robotics and AI Systems
Howard is a leader in modeling trust among humans, robots and AI systems, including conversational agents, emergency response scenarios, autonomous navigation systems, child-robot interaction, and the use of lethal force. Her work introduced human-robot interaction algorithms that, for the first time, quantified the impact of robot mistakes on human trust in a realistic, simulated, and very high-risk scenario. This work has led to better understanding of the biases and social inequities underlying AI and robotic systems.
BROADENING PARTICIPATION/SERVICE TO THE FIELD
Howard has created and led numerous programs designed to engage, recruit, and retain students and faculty from groups that are historically underrepresented in computing, including several NSF-funded Broadening Participation in Computing initiatives. She was the principal investigator for (PI)/co-PI for Popularizing Computing in the Mainstream, which focused on creating interventions to engage underrepresented groups in the computing field; Advancing Robotics for Societal Impact Alliance , an initiative to provide mentorship to computer science faculty and students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs); and Accessible Robotic Programming for Students with Disabilities, an initiative to engage middle- and high school students with disabilities in robotics-based programming activities. She also led and co-founded efforts to broaden participation in the field through the IEEE Robotics PhD Forum and the CRA-WP Graduate Cohort Workshop for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Leadership Skills.
As part of her service to the field, Howard has held key roles on various editorial boards and conference/program committees. Some of her more high-profile efforts have included co-organizing the AAAI Symposium on Accessible Hands-on AI and Robotics Education, the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, the International Conference on Social Robotics, and the IEEE Workshop on Advanced Robotics and Its Social Impacts.
Background
Ayanna Howard is the Dean of the College of Engineering at The Ohio State University. She is the first woman to lead the College of Engineering at Ohio State. Prior to joining Ohio State, Howard was the Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Professor and Chair of the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she founded and was Director of the Human-Automation Systems Lab (HumAnS). She is also founder and President of the Board of Directors of Zyrobotics, a company that develops mobile therapy and educational products for children with special needs.
A graduate of Brown University, Howard earned her MSEE and PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California. She also earned an MBA from Claremont University’s Drucker School of Management.
Howard has authored 250 publications in refereed journals and conferences, including serving as co-editor/co-author of more than a dozen books and/or book chapters. She has also been awarded four patents and has given over 140 invited talks and/or keynotes. She is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Among her many honors, Howard received the Computer Research Association’s A. Nico Habermann Award and the Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award.
2020-2021 ACM Athena Lecturer
ACM has named Sarit Kraus of Bar-Ilan University the 2020-2021 ACM Athena Lecturer for foundational contributions to artificial intelligence, notably to multi-agent systems, human-agent interaction, autonomous agents and nonmonotonic reasoning, and exemplary service and leadership in these fields. Her contributions span theoretical foundations, experimental evaluation, and practical applications. Multi-agent systems are regarded as vital to the increasingly complex challenges within artificial intelligence and have broad applications in a number of areas.
Kraus is recognized as one of the world’s leading researchers in multi-agent systems, in which a distributed group of agents (computers, robots, and/or humans) interact and work collaboratively to solve problems. Beyond her work in multi-agent systems, Kraus has made significant contributions to knowledge representation (another area of artificial intelligence research) by incorporating nonmonotonic reasoning, and to randomized policies for security applications by combining methods from game theory, machine learning and optimization. Kraus is also recognized for her service to the field as an outstanding educator and mentor, as well as for her conference, editorial, and leadership roles.
Initiated in 2006, the ACM Athena Lecturer Award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. The award carries a cash prize of $25,000, with financial support provided by Two Sigma. The Athena Lecturer gives an invited talk at a major ACM conference of her choice.
“Each year, it is ACM’s honor to put a spotlight on the instrumental role that women play in the computing field by selecting an Athena Lecturer,” said ACM President Cherri M. Pancake. “The ability of multi-agent systems to effectively work together is at the core of AI research and will be the lynchpin of many of the technologies that will shape the future. With seminal work in AI stretching back to the early 1990s, it is fair to say that Sarit Kraus has introduced new ways of thinking in multi-agent systems research, while also shepherding research ideas into practical applications. Her colleagues also cite her generosity and sensitivity in mentoring the next generation of researchers, which aligns perfectly with our mission in bestowing this particular award.”
Multi-agent Systems
In a multi-agent system (MAS), a distributed network of agents (which could include computers or humans) work together to solve a problem that is beyond the capacity of a single agent. For example, if two autonomous vehicles were approaching an intersection, the software systems (agents) in each vehicle would communicate with each other via sensors, and perhaps a central computer coordinating traffic in the neighborhood in order to ensure the vehicles would not collide. Multi-agent systems are increasingly used in a wide range of areas, from Internet of Things (IoT) applications like smart cities, supply-chain management, smart electric grids, robotics, and online trading to many mobile computing services.
The focus of Kraus’s research in multi-agent systems has been to develop intelligent agents that can interact proficiently with each other and with people, in both cooperative and conflicting scenarios. As with other areas of AI, this work requires an understanding of human behavior and decision-making in order to develop models for how the agents will make decisions. Toward this goal, Kraus developed innovative methods combining machine learning techniques for human modeling, formal decision-making and game theory approaches to enable agents to interact well with people. In a series of seminal papers, Kraus developed formal models of agent interaction that have been used in several practical applications including the ARMOR project, which combines game theory and optimization methods to improve robotics security at venues such as the Los Angeles International Airport; the Sheba Project, which deploys machine-learning techniques to facilitated training and rehabilitation (including speech therapy) at hospitals in Israel; developing a virtual suspect, integrating psychological models and machine learning, to enhance law enforcement training; recommendation systems for smart cars; and developing an automated mediator for use in studies on the influence of different mediation types on intra- and inter-country negotiations.
Kraus’s work in multi-agent systems also includes the shared plans framework for collaborative planning and acting, models of coalition formation, automated negotiation, and culture-sensitive agents. For example, her 1996 paper, co-authored with Barbara Grosz, “Collaborative plans for complex group action,” provided a framework for investigating fundamental questions about how agents collaborate and has been especially influential in the development of MAS research, having been cited nearly 1,400 times.
Automated Negotiation
Kraus is recognized as a world leader in a subfield of multi-agent systems called automated negotiation, in which the goal is to build computers that can reach agreements with other computers, negotiate on behalf of humans, or perhaps do a better job than human negotiators. Automated negotiation systems are designed to operate without any human intervention. Automated negotiation especially comes into play in economic domains and has garnered increasing interest with the rise of e-commerce applications. As with her broader work within multi-agent systems, Kraus designed models and protocols for automated negotiation algorithms that she introduced in dozens of seminal papers stretching back to the early 1990s. Kraus is a co-author (with Michael Wooldridge and Shaheen Fatima) of the book Principles of Automated Negotiation, a state-of-the-art treatment of the subject.
Nonmonotonic Reasoning
In designing artificially intelligent systems, researchers seek to simulate the logic humans use to make assumptions about the world, even in the face of incomplete or new information. In the traditional example, if a human is told that an animal is a bird, the human will logically assume that it can fly. However, when the human is informed that the bird is a penguin, which cannot fly, the human must adjust his/her logic to allow for potential exceptions to the general rule “all birds fly.” In artificial intelligence, nonmonotonic reasoning refers to the ability of a system to take back conclusions when initial assumptions were incorrect and/or new information is given. Nonmonotonic systems are also designed to reach new/alternative conclusions in these instances. Kraus was the lead author (with Daniel Lehmann and Menachem Magidor) of the landmark 1990 paper “Non-monotonic Reasoning, Preferential Models and Cumulative Logics,” which has been recognized as a highly useful attempt to provide theoretical foundations for nonmonotonic logic that could be used in AI systems. Kraus’s subsequent publications in nonmonotonic logic have shaped the development of this important subfield of AI and opened up new lines of research.
Service to the Field and Mentoring
Over the years, Kraus has served the research community by taking on many volunteer roles. She has been a General, Program or Workshop Chair for several leading AI conferences including IJCAI, ICMAS, AAMAS, and ECAI. Currently, she is serving on the editorial boards of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, and Annals of Maths & AI. As an educator and mentor, she has supervised 62 Master’s students and 34 PhD students. In the spirit of the ACM Athena Lecturer Award, Kraus is also a recognized leader in efforts to increase the participation of women in science.
Biographical Background
Sarit Kraus is a Professor of Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, where her research is focused on intelligent agents and multi-agent systems. She received her Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD degrees from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Kraus has written six books, 122 journal articles, and 176 conference papers, and has received nine patents. Twelve of her publications have won best paper awards and two have won the IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award. She is a Fellow of ACM, the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI), and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Her honors include receiving the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 1995, the ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award in 2007, and the prestigious Israel EMET Prize in 2010.
Background
Sarit Kraus is a Professor of Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, where her research is focused on intelligent agents and multi-agent systems. She received her Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD degrees from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Kraus has written six books, 122 journal articles, and 176 conference papers, and has received nine patents. Twelve of her publications have won best paper awards and two have won the IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award. She is a Fellow of ACM, the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI), and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Her honors include receiving the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 1995, the ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award in 2007, and the prestigious Israel EMET Prize in 2010.
2019-2020 ACM Athena Lecturer
ACM named Elisa Bertino of Purdue University the 2019-2020 ACM Athena Lecturer for pioneering and impactful contributions to data management, security, and privacy, along with outstanding contributions to broadening participation in computing via professional leadership and mentoring. Bertino is recognized as one of the top data management and data security experts in the world, and has made contributions to data security and privacy in many different contexts, including context-based access control; digital identity management; data integrity; Internet of Things and sensor network security; secure and privacy-preserving provenance; privacy-preserving analytics; protection from insider threats; and cloud security. Through these efforts, she provided formal foundations and implementations of mechanisms that have become commonplace in industrial products. Bertino is also an outstanding educator and mentor who has been especially active in encouraging young women to pursue careers in computing.
Initiated in 2006, the ACM Athena Lecturer Award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. The award carries a cash prize of $25,000, with financial support provided by Two Sigma. The Athena Lecturer is invited to present a lecture at an ACM event. Bertino chose to give her Athena Lecture at the ACM Conference on Data Application, Security and Privacy (CODASPY 2019) in Dallas, Texas.
“There are few issues more important to the computing field, and the broader society, than cybersecurity,” said ACM President Cherri M. Pancake. “However, modern cybersecurity approaches need to take into account the way we live now. Elisa Bertino has made fundamental contributions that allow people access to systems based on their roles, the time of day, as well as their locations. These contributions are especially significant because of the mobile revolution and Internet of Things—as well as the fact that systems can be attacked from anywhere in the world. Beyond her extensive research contributions, Bertino has had a lasting impact on the field through her mentorship of younger colleagues.”
Security Access Control Based on Time and Location
In the computer security field, role-based access control (RBAC) allows only authorized users to access a system. Bertino was a trailblazer in extending RBAC controls to take contextual information into account, including time and space considerations. Her 2001 paper T-RBAC: A temporal role-based access control model, co-authored with Piero Andrea Bonatti and Elena Ferrari, outlined how access to a system could be made available at certain times and unavailable at others. The paper has been cited more than 1,000 times and transformed the design of security systems developed by industry.
In 2007 Bertino and co-authors made another significant contribution to role-based access control in the paper GEO-RBAC: A Spatially Aware RBAC, in which the access depends on user location. Bertino’s GEO-RBAC model was introduced before mobile computing became ubiquitous, and has become an essential component of most security systems.
Bertino has made several other contributions to access control models and enforcement mechanisms, including original contributions to privacy-aware access control, attribute-based access control, encryption-based access control for data on the cloud and tools for policy analysis.
Security of Cellular Networks
Bertino’s pioneering work on the security of cellular networks is exemplified in her recent paper, LTEInspector: A Systematic Approach for Adversarial Testing of 4G, which introduced a model-based testing approach to investigate the security and privacy of the 4G LTE protocol. Bertino and colleagues uncovered 10 new, as well as nine prior, attacks. Security experts see the LTEInpsector approach as an important tool in securing 4G as well as 5G networks. For this recent work, Bertino was named to the GSMA Mobile Security Research Hall of Fame.
Professional Leadership and Mentoring
In the spirit of the Athena Award, Bertino has been a strong advocate and mentor for women. For example, 16 of the 35 PhD students she has mentored are women, and five of the PhD students currently working in her lab are women. To address the ongoing gender imbalance in the cybersecurity field, Bertino recently co-founded (with Danfeng Yao) the Workshop for Women in Cybersecurity (CyberW).
Biographical Background
Elisa Bertino is the Samuel Conte Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University, where she also heads the Cyber Space Security Lab. She held positions in industry, including the IBM Almaden Research Center, and academia, most notably at the University of Milan, before joining Purdue University in 2004. Bertino received her Dr degree in Computer Science from the University of Pisa.
Bertino is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE and AAAS, and has received several awards and honors, including the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award, the Tsutomu Kanai Award, and the ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Contributions Award.
The ACM Athena Lecturer Award is named after Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. With her knowledge and sense of purpose, Athena epitomizes the strength, determination, and intelligence of the “Athena Lecturers.”
Bertino will formally receive the Athena Lecturer Award at ACM’s annual awards banquet on June 15, 2019 in San Francisco.
Background
Elisa Bertino is the Samuel Conte Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University, where she also heads the Cyber Space Security Lab. She held positions in industry, including the IBM Almaden Research Center, and academia, most notably at the University of Milan, before joining Purdue University in 2004. Bertino received her Dr degree in Computer Science from the University of Pisa.
Bertino is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE and AAAS, and has received several awards and honors, including the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award, the Tsutomu Kanai Award, and the ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Contributions Award.
2018-2019 ACM Athena Lecturer
ACM named Andrea Goldsmith of Stanford University the 2018-2019 Athena Lecturer for contributions to the theory and practice of adaptive wireless communications, and for the successful transfer of research to commercial technology. Goldsmith introduced innovative approaches to the design, analysis and fundamental performance limits of wireless systems and networks. Her efforts helped develop technologies used in long-term evolution (LTE) cellular devices as well as the Wi-Fi standards that are used in wireless local area networks. Goldsmith participated in the launch of companies to commercialize her work, which has led to the adoption of her ideas throughout the communications industry.
Initiated in 2006 by the ACM Council on Women in Computing (ACM-W), the Athena Lecturer Award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. The award carries a cash prize of $25,000, with financial support provided by Google.
“The anytime, anywhere computing era in which we now live owes a debt to innovators like Andrea Goldsmith who have helped lay the groundwork for the wireless infrastructure that makes mobile computing possible,” said ACM President Vicki L. Hanson. “Her work has improved the transmission, reception and overall quality of wireless communications. Importantly, Goldsmith’s career has exemplified the spirit of the ACM Athena Lecturer Award in the numerous ways she has mentored young women throughout her career. She has helped prepare promising young women PhD students and postdocs for faculty positions, and she has worked to develop actionable strategies to improve the climate, recruitment and retention of women in the high tech industry.”
Adaptive MIMO
Beginning in the early 1990s, Goldsmith developed several fundamental capacity results for wireless systems. Understanding the Shannon capacity limits of these systems can lead to benefits including increased data rates and extended range while lessening the impact of ongoing challenges in wireless communications including co-channel interference, poor reception, and outages. Goldsmith was the first to propose and develop the underlying theory for time-varying adaptive modulation, as well as new multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) techniques that have been employed throughout the field to improve network capacity and performance.
She proposed techniques, including design of modulation and coding scheme (MCS) tables and quadrature amplitude modulation (MQAM and code) indexed by signal noise radio (SNR) bands, that are used in a variety of wireless systems including EDGE, Wi-Fi and 3GPP/LTE.
Quantenna
In 2005, Goldsmith founded Quantenna Communications to build a product and company around her research in adaptive MIMO wireless. In 2008, as CTO, she led the development of the world’s first 4x4 adaptive MIMO 802.11n Wi-Fi chipset. Compared with other Wi-Fi products on the market, the Quantenna chipset provided better data rates, coverage and reliability and was especially effective for wireless distribution of multiple HD video streams. Today Quantenna products are used by major carriers including AT&T, DirectTV, Comcast, France Telecom, Swisscom and Telefonica.
Biographical Background
Andrea Goldsmith is the Stephen Harris Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University. She co-founded and served as Chief Technical Officer of Plume Wi-Fi and of Quantenna, and she currently serves on the corporate or technical advisory boards of Crown Castle Inc., Interdigital Corp., Sequans, Quantenna and Cohere.
Goldsmith has published 160 journal papers, 320 peer-reviewed conference papers, and three textbooks, one of which has been translated into Chinese, Japanese and Russian. She also holds 29 patents, with three pending. Goldsmith is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a Fellow of the IEEE and of Stanford. She has received several awards for her work, including the IEEE ComSoc Edwin H. Armstrong Achievement Award, as well as the National Academy of Engineering Gilbreth Lecture Award. Goldsmith received her PhD, MS and BS degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.
The Athena Lecturer is invited to present a lecture at an ACM event. Goldsmith’s Athena Lecture will be delivered at an ACM event later this year. The award is named after Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. With her knowledge and sense of purpose, Athena epitomizes the strength, determination, and intelligence of the “Athena Lecturers.”
Goldsmith will formally receive the Athena Lecturer Award at ACM’s annual awards banquet on June 23, 2018 in San Francisco.
2017-2018 Athena Lecturer
ACM named Lydia E. Kavraki of Rice University as the 2017-2018 Athena Lecturer. Kavraki was cited for the invention of randomized motion-planning algorithms in robotics and the development of robotics-inspired methods for bioinformatics and biomedicine. Kavraki is an internationally recognized leader in developing physical algorithms, an area that addresses the computational challenges of objects moving in space while subject to physical constraints. She has made significant contributions in an impressively wide range of areas, from how a robot might move through a course of obstacles, to how a drug molecule might change its shape to interact with a target protein, to her current work with planning the motions of Robonaut 2, NASA’s robotic assistant at the International Space Station.
Initiated in 2006 by the ACM Council on Women in Computing (ACM-W), the Athena Lecturer Award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. The award carries a cash prize of $25,000, with financial support provided by Google. The Athena Lecturer is invited to present a lecture at an ACM event. The award is named after Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. With her knowledge and sense of purpose, Athena epitomizes the strength, determination, and intelligence of the "Athena Lecturers."
“Planning the motion of objects in a three-dimensional space has been a central challenge in the robotics field for a long time,” said ACM President Vicki L. Hanson. “Lydia Kavraki’s Probabilistic Roadmap Method has had a tremendous impact. It is now widely used in robotics applications in industry and is a foundational idea for numerous researchers in the field. She was then able to transfer the insights she discovered in robotics to bioinformatics and biomedicine, where she has also made important advances. Although Kavraki is being recognized with the Athena Lecturer Award for her research contributions, she has also been a generous mentor and strong role model for younger colleagues, especially women. In this way, her career exemplifies the award’s overarching goal of celebrating and supporting women in computing.”
Kavraki’s 1996 doctoral dissertation proposed the Probabilistic Roadmap Method (PRM), a technique to plan the motion of robots, which had been an enduring challenge in the field. The Probabilistic Roadmap Method was immediately hailed for its simple implementation and its ability to scale (that is, return reliable results when applied to increasingly large datasets). PRM and the subsequent advances on the original approach are now included as a fundamental tenet of motion planning in most robotics textbooks. Additionally, to aid in the dissemination of her research, Kavraki spearheaded an open source Open Motion Planning Library. The library has been used in more than 30 different robotics systems, and continues to receive new contributions from around the world.
Kavraki was also the first to recognize that the motion-planning techniques she was developing in robotics could be applied to great effect in biology and medicine. She wrote new algorithms for the analysis of the motion, shape and flexibility of molecules that had a major impact on computational biology, as well as many subareas, including drug discovery and design. Recently, she has been developing structural methods to identify cross-reactivity hot spots in T-cells. The project has the potential to introduce safer immunotherapy treatments for cancer patients.
In another exciting project that takes her research to new heights, Kavraki has been working with NASA on Robonaut 2 (R2), a humanoid robot with formidable mechanical capability and capacity to work in human-occupied environments. It is anticipated that R2s will help humans in spaceship inspection and maintenance, caretaking tasks in future long missions, and space exploration. The variety of ways in which the robot will need to move, as well as NASA’s hopes that R2 will perform dexterous manipulation—that is, complete delicate tasks with its hands—will require leading-edge motion-planning technology. R2 was expected to be deployed at the International Space Station later in 2017.
Lydia Kavraki will formally receive the 2017-2018 ACM Athena Lecturer Award at ACM's annual Awards Banquet on June 24, 2017 in San Francisco, California.
ACM Council on Women Hails Leader in Data Networking
Princeton's Rexford Created Models of Network-Wide Traffic Flows and Measurement that Revolutionized Research, Industry
Jennifer Rexford of Princeton University has been named as the 2016-2017 ACM-W Athena Lecturer. Rexford was cited for innovations that improved the efficiency of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) in routing Internet traffic, for laying the groundwork for software-defined networks (SDNs) and for contributions in measuring and engineering IP networks. These contributions greatly enhanced the stability and flow of Internet transmissions, and make data networks easier to design, understand and manage.
“BGP is the ‘glue’ that binds the Internet together and Jennifer’s innovations have vastly improved the BGP’s effectiveness,” said Judith Olson, who heads the ACM-W awards committee. “Her work played an important role as the Internet became a worldwide phenomenon, and she continues pioneering work to address the growing challenges presented by issues such as scalability and security.”
Networks facilitate communications between computing devices, but to be able to communicate, computers or applications need to use the same communication protocols. In the field of Internet interdomain routing, Rexford’s work has had a substantial impact on the BGP, a framework that makes routing decisions based on paths, network policies or rule-sets configured by a network administrator. BGP supports flexible policies for how traffic flows through the Internet, but conflicting policies in different networks can easily lead to instability. Rexford’s research showed that the local economic incentives that drive operational routing policies lead to a stable global routing system. More recently, Rexford has designed incrementally-deployable extensions to BGP to greatly improve both the security and the scalability of Internet routing.
Rexford also made major advances in laying the foundation for software-defined networking (SDN). A traditional problem in data networking has been the tight coupling of proprietary control software with the underlying network devices, stifling innovation. In her seminal work, “Design and Implementation of a Routing Control Platform,” Rexford proposed a way to separate a network’s control software from its data functions. Her framework laid the groundwork for today’s software-defined networking. More recently, Rexford's collaborations with programming languages researchers created powerful new abstractions for designing new network control applications. SDN enables new degrees of innovation within the network and has revolutionized networking research and industry.
The 2016-2017 Athena Lecturer will be formally recognized at the ACM Annual Awards Banquet, June 11, in San Francisco, California. Rexford’s Athena Lecture will be delivered at an event to be determined.
Jennifer Widom named ACM-W 2015-2016 Athena Lecturer
Jennifer Widom introduced the fundamental concepts and architectures of active database systems, a major area of research in the database field today. Active database systems allow application developers to embed logic into the database that allow actions to be executed when certain conditions are met. Active database systems have had a major impact on commercial database management systems, and most modern relational databases include active database features.
Widom made fundamental contributions to the study of semi-structured data management. Semi-structured data management systems are a key technology to support many advanced applications today, such as genomic databases, multimedia applications and digital libraries. Widom led the Lore project, which made important contributions on how to share, index and query semi-structured data sets, and developed the Lorel query language. Lorel has had a major impact on the research community, and many of its concepts have been applied to the design of query languages for XML data.
The Athena Lecturer is invited to present a lecture at an ACM event. Widom’s lecture will be delivered on June 2, 2015 at the 2015 ACM SIGMOD Conference in Melbourne, Australia.
ACM-W Names Susan T. Dumais 2014-2015 Athena Lecturer
ACM-W named Susan T. Dumais of Microsoft Research as the 2014-2015 Athena Lecturer. Dumais introduced novel algorithms and interfaces for interactive retrieval that have made it easier for people to find, use and make sense of information. Her research, at the intersection of human-computer interaction and information retrieval, has broad applications for understanding and improving searching and browsing from the Internet to the desktop. The Athena Lecturer award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. It includes a $10,000 honorarium provided by Google Inc.
“Dumais has helped us understand that the search is not the end goal,” said Mary Jane Irwin, who heads the ACM-W awards committee. “Her focus is on understanding when and why people search, and presenting results in context to help integrate those results into the larger search process. Her sustained contributions have shaped the thinking and direction of human-computer interaction and information retrieval, and influenced generations of student interns through collaborative projects with academic and industry partners.”
Dumais’ initial research demonstrated that different people use different vocabulary to describe the same thing, and that this mismatch limits the success of traditional keyword-based information retrieval methods. To build search systems that avoided the vocabulary problem, she and her colleagues invented Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). A key feature of LSI is its ability to extract the latent conceptual structure from a large collection of texts by analyzing the associations between terms that occur in similar contexts, thus enabling a search engine to retrieve using concepts rather than keywords. Beyond information retrieval, LSI has been used to model various aspects of human cognition such as language acquisition and textual coherence.
Recently, Dumais’ research has analyzed how web content changes over time and how people revisit web pages, establishing that re-visitation patterns are influenced by user intent and changes in content. Her results have produced a retrieval model that uses web page changes to improve search ranking, and new tools to help people understand how the information they interact with changes over time in both expected and unexpected ways. Finally, her research on user modeling and context has enabled search engines to personalize search experiences for different individuals.
The author of more than 200 articles on information science, human-computer interaction, and cognitive science, Dumais holds several patents on novel retrieval algorithms and interfaces.
ACM Names Maja Matarić 2024-2025 Athena Lecturer
ACM has named Maja Matarić, the Chan Soon-Shiong Chair and Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, as the 2024-2025 ACM Athena Lecturer. Matarić is recognized for pioneering the field of socially assistive robotics, including groundbreaking research, evaluation, and technology transfer, and foundational work in multi-robot coordination and human-robot interaction. Matarić is also the founding director of the USC Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center, and a Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind.
![2023-2024 ACM Athena Lecturer Maja Matarić](/binaries/ctaimagelarge/content/gallery/acm/ctas/people/maja-mataric-athena.jpg)
ACM Awards by Category
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Career-Long Contributions
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Early-to-Mid-Career Contributions
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Specific Types of Contributions
ACM Charles P. "Chuck" Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award
ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics
ACM Frances E. Allen Award for Outstanding Mentoring
ACM Gordon Bell Prize
ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modeling
ACM Luiz André Barroso Award
ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award
ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award
ACM Policy Award
ACM Presidential Award
ACM Software System Award
ACM Athena Lecturer Award
ACM AAAI Allen Newell Award
ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award
ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award
Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award
SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering
ACM Programming Systems and Languages Paper Award -
Student Contributions
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Regional Awards
ACM India Doctoral Dissertation Award
ACM India Early Career Researcher Award
ACM India Outstanding Contributions in Computing by a Woman Award
ACM India Outstanding Contribution to Computing Education Award
IPSJ/ACM Award for Early Career Contributions to Global Research
CCF-ACM Award for Artificial Intelligence -
SIG Awards
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How Awards Are Proposed