Dr. Brent Waters

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has named 71 members ACM Fellows for wide-ranging and fundamental contributions in areas including algorithms, computer science education, cryptography, data security and privacy, medical informatics, and mobile and networked systems ─ among many other areas. The accomplishments of the 2021 ACM Fellows underpin important innovations that shape the technologies we use every day.

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. Fellows are nominated by their peers, with nominations reviewed by a distinguished selection committee.

“Computing professionals have brought about leapfrog advances in how we live, work, and play,” said ACM President Gabriele Kotsis. “New technologies are the result of skillfully combining the individual contributions of numerous men and women, often building upon diverse contributions that have emerged over decades. But technological progress would not be possible without the essential building blocks of individual contributors. The ACM Fellows program honors the creativity and hard work of ACM members whose specific accomplishments make broader advances possible. In announcing a new class of Fellows each year, we celebrate the impact ACM Fellows make, as well as the many technical areas of computing in which they work.”

In keeping with ACM’s global reach, the 2021 Fellows represent universities, corporations, and research centers in Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, and the United States.

The contributions of the 2021 Fellows run the gamut of the computing field―including cloud database systems, deep learning acceleration, high performance computing, robotics, and theoretical computer science ─ to name a few.

Additional information about the 2021 ACM Fellows, as well as previously named ACM Fellows, is available through the ACM Fellows site.

News release

ACM announced the recipients of four prestigious technical awards: ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award, ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award, and ACM Software System Award. These innovators were selected by their peers for making significant contributions that enable the computing field to solve real-world challenges. The awards reflect achievements in cryptography, network coding systems, computer-human interaction, and software systems. The 2015 recipients will be formally honored at the ACM Awards Banquet on June 11 in San Francisco.

Brent Waters, recipient of the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for the introduction and development of the concepts of attribute-based encryption and functional encryption. Waters’ innovations enhance security efforts at a time when greater volumes of highly confidential data are moving to the cloud. Traditionally, public-key encryption makes use of a public key that targets ciphertexts to a specific user that holds one secret key. Waters’ introduction of attribute-based encryption presented a new design where an administrator can create a policy-specific decryption key that will enable decryption of only the underlying files that satisfy the policy. Functional encryption, as conceived by Waters, takes things further by allowing an administrator to create private keys that allow a decryptor to learn only a particular function of the encrypted data, thus limiting their view to what they need to know about the data. Waters is an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been named a Sloan Fellow, a Packard Fellow and a Microsoft Faculty Fellow. His many additional honors include receiving the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.