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.
