ACM Awards

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 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.