Andre Seznec

ACM and IEEE Computer Society named André Seznec as the recipient of the ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award. Seznec, a Fellow Research Director at INRIA/IRISA and a Fellow at SiFive, is recognized for his extensive impact on computing, most notably pioneering contributions to branch prediction and cache memories. 

Seznec’s inventions can be found in billions of CPUs worldwide. These include the TAGE branch predictor and skewed-associative cache. In fact, Seznec’s work has served as a gold standard of branch prediction for the last 15 years, with most current structures in industrial designs rooted in his trailblazing contributions.

His early contributions were in vector architectures, particularly the memory system. Since the early 1990s, his main research activity has been focused on the architecture of microprocessors, including caches, pipelines, branch predictors, speculative execution, multithreading, and multicores. His research has influenced the design of many high-end industrial microprocessors, particularly the caches and the branch predictors.

Over the course of his career, Seznec has published more than 100 papers with many of his most notable contributions published solely under his name, demonstrating the profound impact he has had in solving some of the most challenging problems in computer architecture.

In addition, Seznec has been a dedicated supporter of industry education, collaboration, and advancement. He served multiple years on the organizing committee of the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) acting as general chair in 2010 and program committee chair in 2016. He has also supported the future of computing as an educator, having graduated 28 PhD students from 1991 to 2020.

ACM named 53 of its members as 2016 ACM Fellows for major contributions in areas including artificial intelligence, cryptography, computer architecture, high performance computing and programming languages. The achievements of the 2016 ACM Fellows are accelerating the digital revolution, and affect almost every aspect of how we live and work today.

"As nearly 100,000 computing professionals are members of our association, to be selected to join the top one percent is truly an honor,” explains ACM President Vicki L. Hanson. “Fellows are chosen by their peers and hail from leading universities, corporations and research labs throughout the world. Their inspiration, insights and dedication bring immeasurable benefits that improve lives and help drive the global economy."

Underscoring ACM’s global reach, 2016 Fellows hail from organizations in Australia, Austria, Canada, China, France, India, Israel, Italy, The Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The 2016 Fellows have been cited for numerous contributions in areas including cloud computing, computer security, data science, Internet routing and security, large-scale distributed computing, mobile computing, spoken-language processing and theoretical computer science.