About the ACM Distinguished Service Award

Ramesh Jain, Professor, University of California, Irvine, receives the ACM Distinguished Service Award for establishing the ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia Systems (SIGMM), and for outstanding leadership and sustained services to ACM and the computing community for the past four decades.

In 1993, Jain organized the first NSF workshop on visual information management systems. He was one of the organizing committee members of the first ACM Multimedia conference and gave a tutorial at that conference, which was held in conjunction with ACM SIGGraph that year. All these activities paved the way for the successful establishment of ACM SIGMM.

Since then, Jain has remained an active contributor to ACM Multimedia Computing. He has been on the organizing committees of almost all the past 25 ACM Multimedia Conferences. Additionally, he organized special issues of Communications of the ACM on visual computing, served as founding Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Multimedia magazine, organized numerous workshops, served on editorial boards of almost all multimedia-related journals, and helped SIGMM in many ways including chairing it from 2003 to 2007.

For his contributions and service, Jain has received numerous awards and has been recognized as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), SPIE (an international society for optics and photonics), and the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR).

Erik Altman, Research Scientist at IBM Research, receives the ACM Distinguished Service Award for leadership in the computer architecture communities, and for contributions to ACM organizational development.

Erik Altman has demonstrated excellence, both as a computer architecture research scientist at IBM and as a driver of positive change within the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society. For example, as chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Microarchitecture (SIGMICRO), Altman drove the recognition of important contributions by co-founding and chairing the Micro Hall of Fame award. He also helped establish a successful oral history project and worked to improve computer architecture conferences.

As chair of ACM's Special Interest Group (SIG) Governing Board, he worked to better coordinate the activities of the more than three dozen SIGs. He tested ways to engage and educate the larger ACM community with daily news feeds, paving the way for ACM's successful TechNews. He contributed to ACM's financial well-being by serving on the Executive Committee as Secretary-Treasurer for two years. He has also been a long-term member of the ACM Investment Committee, which oversees a $100M+ fund.

As editor-in-chief of IEEE Computer Society’s Micro journal for four years, Altman drove the creation of important special themed issues. He helped establish the IEEE Rau Award for substantial contributions to microarchitectures. As a member of the IEEE Computer Society's Magazine Operations Committee, he has worked to improve the financial health of several IEEE magazines.

He has also served as program chair, vice-chair, or general chair of many conferences for topics in computer architecture, machine learning, and logic.

In parallel with his volunteer work, Altman has had a prolific industrial research career spanning computer architecture, compilers, and parallel computing. He worked on IBM Research’s Dynamically Architected Instruction Set from Yorktown (DAISY) project, which solved many difficult problems in dynamic binary instruction translation and had significant research impact and influence. He has twice received an IBM Outstanding Innovation Achievement Award. Altman has more recently led efforts to do early detection of cyber-attacks using continuous learning in multiple dimensions and has explored the generation of synthetic financial and medical training data for use in machine learning models.

Jennifer Tour Chayes, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, was named recipient of the ACM Distinguished Service Award for her effective leadership, mentorship, and dedication to diversity during her distinguished career of computer science research, teaching, and institution building.

Chayes’ service to the computing community is broad and sustained, encompassing leadership at both Microsoft Research and the University of California, Berkeley; service to many computing organizations; expanding the diversity of the computing field through mentorship of women, underrepresented racial minorities and other disadvantaged groups; and making important research contributions.

Chayes’ distinguished service includes founding and leading the Theory Group at Microsoft Research and the Microsoft Research New England and New York City Labs. She also had an important role in the development of Microsoft’s Montreal lab.

The MSR labs that Chayes founded had three times the percentage of women compared to corporate labs, and an unusually high percentage of people of color and members of the LGBTQ community. She has mentored more than 100 women in her career, many of whom have gone on to become leaders in their fields. Chayes continues to emphasize diversity as a core value at Berkeley in her position as Associate Provost of the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society, and Dean of the School of Information.

Additionally, Chayes has an exceptionally strong record of service at the national and international levels to the computing community. Her service includes participation in advisory boards and committees associated with the National Academy of Sciences, the National Research Council, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and numerous other organizations. She has served on the Turing Award committee and the Heidelberg Laureate Selection Committee. She has served as an Associate Editor for many leading journals in statistical physics, computer science, mathematics, and data science, and has served as a co-organizer of numerous conferences across these fields.

Michael Ley was named recipient of the ACM Distinguished Service Award for creating, developing, and curating DBLP, an extraordinarily useful and influential online bibliographic resource that has changed the way computer scientists work.

Until the early 1990s, finding relevant literature and compiling the bibliographic references for a paper or a dissertation was a manual and tedious effort for students and authors. Ley, of the University of Trier and Schloss Dagstuhl − Leibniz Center for Informatics, created DBLP in 1993 to cover proceedings and journals from the fields of database systems and logic programming (from which the acronym “DBLP” arose). The author pages provided links to co-authors and corresponding table-of-contents entries, forming a browsable person-publication network. After positive feedback from the database community, Ley added data from further computer science disciplines.

Today, DBLP lists more than 5 million publications and is used to search for bibliographic entries (its original intent), as well as to evaluate persons or institutions, and to support program committee chairs, editors, and reviewers. Strengths of DBLP include the quality of its data, which results in a very low rate of errors, as well as the unique identification of authors. DBLP has changed the way computer scientists use bibliographic data and has become an invaluable asset for virtually every researcher in the field.

During the 1990s and 2000s, DBLP was largely a one-man endeavor. In the last decade, Ley organized a DBLP team at Schloss Dagstuhl − Leibniz Center for Informatics. Through DBLP, Ley has made the enormous body of published computer science research more accessible and useful to the entire community.

Victor Bahl was named recipient of the ACM Distinguished Service Award for significant and lasting service to the broad community of mobile and wireless networking, and for building strong linkages between academia, industry, and government agencies. His efforts have led to the creation of a prolific global community with a strong foundation that has created leaders and fostered and supported tens of thousands of researchers and engineers worldwide working in these areas. Bahl, a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research, was a co-founder and the driving force behind ACM SIGMobile, ACM’s Special Interest Group dedicated to all things mobile. He created MobiSys, the International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services, and for nearly two decades has steered MobiCom, the International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking. Under Bahl’s leadership, both of these conferences have grown to become highly respected international events and publication venues. Also in the vein of publishing and disseminating the best in mobile technology research, Bahl founded GetMobile, a quarterly scientific publication related to wireless communications and mobility, and served as its first editor.

He has been especially active in advancing the field by strengthening ties and fostering better understanding among academics, practitioners, and government officials. For example, he has positively influenced spectrum policies of the US Federal Communications Commission and that of several European, South American and Asian countries, through technology inventions, demonstrations, and technical evangelism involving academia-industry-government collaboration on opportunities around dynamic spectrum sharing, and he has initiated key efforts in mobile computing and wireless networking within the US National Science Foundation.

In the beginning of the last decade, when experimental wireless research was hampered by the lack of realistic hardware and software tools (especially in academia), Bahl led, through Microsoft Research, the creation and free distribution of the Mesh Academic Research Kit, a significant enabler for research in Wi-Fi systems, which has been adopted by more than 1,200 academic institutions worldwide. This toolkit allowed academic researchers to experiment with mesh technologies. He also drove the creation created of the complementary Microsoft Digital Inclusion program that disbursed more than $1.2 million in funding to academic institutions that applied wireless mesh and related technologies to bridge the digital divide in communities around the world. In the early days of cloud computing, Bahl created a research and training program, with tools and services, on cloud-powered mobile computing. Over 60 large universities offered senior and graduate-level courses based on this program.

The ACM Distinguished Service Award is presented on the basis of value and degree of services to the computing community. The contribution should not be limited to service to the Association, but should include activities in other computer organizations and should emphasize contributions to the computing community at large.

Jan Cuny was named recipient of the ACM Distinguished Service Award for the establishment and tireless promotion of projects that have nationally transformed CS education by increasing and diversifying access to high-quality CS education. When she joined the US National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2004, Cuny initiated the Broadening Participation in Computing Program (BPC), which aimed to significantly increase the number of college students earning degrees in computing across the country. The BPC program sought to increase the participation in computing of traditionally underrepresented groups, including women, minorities and persons with disabilities. BPC seeded a number of alliances—large-scale efforts that are continuing to work at the national level to increase diversity in the computing field.

In the K-12 arena, Cuny built on the work of one of those alliances, Into the Loop, that successfully introduced a new high school course, Exploring Computer Science, designed with equity as a core consideration.  Cuny worked with the College Board to develop a new national Advanced Placement (AP) computer science course and exam with similar goals of attracting traditionally underrepresented groups. One challenge the planners faced was that of the 23,000 public high schools in the United States, only 2,000 offered computer science education. Creating new NSF programs, Cuny launched an effort to catalyze a movement to add 10,000 new well-trained CS teachers throughout the country in 10 years. This ambitious professional development effort was dubbed “CS10K.”

While the milestone of 10,000 new CS teachers has not quite been reached yet, Cuny’s vision of a new, more inclusive CS course is a reality. AP Computer Science Principles was launched in the 2016-2017 academic year. More than 2,500 schools offered the course and more than 50,000 students took the exam—the biggest launch in the AP’s history. CS10K became the forerunner to today’s CSforAll movement that is transforming CS education for grades preK-12.

The ACM Distinguished Service Award is presented on the basis of value and degree of services to the computing community. The contribution should not be limited to service to the Association, but should include activities in other computer organizations and should emphasize contributions to the computing community at large.

Leonard Jay Shustek was named recipient of the ACM Distinguished Service Award for the establishment and success of the Computer History Museum, the world’s leading institution in exploring the history of computing and its impact on society.  Shustek has helped bring to the world the story of how the greatest innovation of our time has come to be. In 1995, after retiring from the network diagnostic company he co-founded, Shustek began teaching computer architecture at Stanford University. He soon realized that students were as interested in computer history as they were in computer architecture. Instead of returning to Stanford, he began a quest that would ultimately lead him to acquire a group of artifacts from The Computer Museum in Boston, with an eye toward forming a new computer history museum in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Today, thanks to the leadership, vision and tenacity of Shustek, the Computer History Museum (CHM) is acknowledged as the world’s most important museum chronicling the rise of computing and its impact on society. With a staff of 75 serving 200,000 visitors each year, CHM has realized Shustek’s founding goal of an organization that would be “built to last.” CHM is housed in a complex comprised of a 119,000-square-foot building for exhibits and hands-on labs; a 25,000-square-foot climate-controlled warehouse for papers and artifacts; and a new 50,000-square-foot research center for scholars and archival work. Throughout the museum’s growth and development, Shustek has engaged in a range of activities, from leading the museum in raising $125 million to tracking down vintage code related to operating systems no longer in use.

For the general public, signature exhibitions like “Revolution” translate the history of computing into an experience that the average person can not only appreciate, but enjoy. For the computing field, CHM’s role as the world’s major repository of artifacts and historic preservation allows innovators to access the past, in order to move into the future.

The ACM Distinguished Service Award is presented on the basis of value and degree of services to the computing community. The contribution should not be limited to service to the Association, but should include activities in other computer organizations and should emphasize contributions to the computing community at large.

Ron Perrott, an international leader in the development and promotion of parallel computing, will receive ACM’s prestigious Distinguished Service Award. He will be formally honored at the ACM Awards Banquet on June 11 in San Francisco.

Perrott was selected by his peers for providing vision and leadership in high performance computing and e-science, championing new initiatives and advocating collaboration among interested groups at both national and international levels. Perrott has been an effective advocate for high performance and grid computing in Europe since the 1970s, working tirelessly and successfully with academic, governmental, and industrial groups to convince them of the importance of developing shared resources for high-performance computing at both national and regional levels. He has striven to increase awareness of the benefits which broadening the scope of computational science and data science could bring, by playing an instrumental role in the development of e-science initiatives. In addition to his activities within the British and European computing communities, he has given significant service to the broader international community, including the development of programs to stimulate and increase international participation in major computing conferences, and serving as chair of the ACM Fellows Committee.

Perrott’s efforts to advance parallel processing include being chair of the UK’s High Performance Computing Strategy Committee and a founding member of both Euro-Par, the premiere European conference on parallel computing, and the ACM Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC). Perrott has been consistently at the forefront of the promotion of high performance computing since he worked at the NASA Ames Research Center in the 1970s on what is regarded as the world’s first high performance computer, the ILLIAC IV.

Perrott chaired a European Union Working Group on grid computing and was an initiator of the EU Network of Excellence in grid computing, which involved over 40 institutions. Perrott was also a founding member of the UK Computing Research Committee and has contributed to strategic IT developments in over 12 countries worldwide.

High performance computers are the fastest available computing devices and are leading agents in furthering the development of computing and extending the scope and variety of its applications — they have been at the forefront of technological advances in much the same way as Formula1 motor racing technology has pioneered improvements in commercial vehicles. Over the years HPC has been instrumental in the creation of component technologies which have surprisingly rapidly percolated down into computing devices now in common and widespread use. For example, current laptops/mobile devices have the power of the supercomputers of the 1990s — such has been the speed with which the technologies have been exploited.

Perrott is a visiting professor at The University of Oxford’s e-Research Centre and a former director of the Belfast e-Science Centre. He has been named a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE and the British Computing Society.

ACM has recognized the vision and achievement of a leader who has transformed the way the world views computing. Jeannette Wing of Microsoft Research advocated for a concept she called “computational thinking,” a way of solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior that draws on concepts fundamental to computer science.   She is the 2014  recipient of the ACM Distinguished Service Award for helping the computing community articulate the promise of computation to broad audiences. She has positioned the field to communicate the core concepts of computing in elegant and easily understood ways, and has championed its introduction in numerous national and international venues. She has also drawn new and diverse audiences to the field of computer science. A Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research, Wing has oversight of its core research laboratories around the world.

Press Release

ACM has recognized the vision and achievement of a leader who has transformed the way the world views computing.  Jeannette Wing of Microsoft Research advocated for a concept she called “computational thinking,” a way of solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior that draws on concepts fundamental to computer science.

Jeannette Wing recipient of the ACM Distinguished Service Award for helping the computing community articulate the promise of computation to broad audiences. She has positioned the field to communicate the core concepts of computing in elegant and easily understood ways, and has championed its introduction in numerous national and international venues. She has also drawn new and diverse audiences to the field of computer science. A Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research, Wing has oversight of its core research laboratories around the world.

Gerhard Goos of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Juris Hartmanis of Cornell University, and Jan van Leeuwen of Utrecht University, recipients of the ACM Distinguished Service Award for their definitive role in establishing computer science as a vibrant subject. Their stewardship as series editors of the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), published since 1973, launched this series into a highly visible platform for disseminating research results from all areas of the nascent computing field. At a time when researchers often worked in isolation, they provided a widely read forum for exploring new areas, enabling dissemination of ideas, and offering initial exposure to young researchers. 

Mateo Valero of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center is the 2012 recipient of the Distinguished Service Award for steering initiatives in Europe that advanced high-performance computing research and education.  Valero made a strategic case for major funding initiatives at the regional, national and European Union (EU) levels.  He is a founder of HiPEAC, a European Network of Excellence that directs high-performance and embedded computing systems for its members and partners, and expands science research and academic-industry cooperation.  He also created and directed the European Center for Parallelism of Barcelona (CEPBA); was a director of C4, the Catalan Center for Computation and Communications; and led the CEPBA-IBM Research Institute, created to conduct research on parallel computers.  He is a founding member of the Royal Spanish Academy of Engineering, and Correspondant Academic of the Spanish Royal Academy of Science and the Mexican Academy of Sciences. A member of the Royal Spanish Academy of Doctors and the Academia Europaea, he holds Honorary Doctor degrees from the Universities of Chalmers and Belgrade, and from the Universities Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Zaragoza, and Complutense of Madrid in Spain, and the University of Veracruz in Mexico.  For his research in computer architecture, Valero received the Eckert-Mauchly Award from ACM and IEEE Computer Society, and the Harry Goode Award from IEEE CS.  He is director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.  A graduate of Polytechnic University of Catalonia, he is a Fellow of ACM and IEEE.