Turing Award

ACM Turing Award
Stephen Kettle's slate statue of Alan Turing at Bletchley Park
Awarded for	Outstanding contributions in computer science
Country	New York, (United States)
Presented by	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Reward	US $1,000,000[1]
First awarded	1966
Last awarded	2015
Official website	amturing.acm.org

The ACM A.M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community". It is stipulated that "The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field".^[2] The Turing Award is generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science^[3][4] and the "Nobel Prize of computing".^[5][6]

The award is named after Alan Turing, mathematician and reader in mathematics at the University of Manchester, later fellow at the University of Cambridge. Turing is often credited for being the key founder of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.^[7] From 2007 to 2013, the award was accompanied by a prize of US$250,000, with financial support provided by Intel and Google.^[2] Since 2014, the award has been accompanied by a prize of US$1 million,^[1] with financial support provided by Google.^[8]

The first recipient, in 1966, was Alan Perlis, of Carnegie Mellon University. The first female recipient was Frances E. Allen of IBM in 2006.^[9]

Recipients

Year	Recipients	Citation
1966	Alan J. Perlis	For his influence in the area of advanced computer programming techniques and compiler construction[10]
1967	Maurice Wilkes	Professor Wilkes is best known as the builder and designer of the EDSAC, the first computer with an internally stored program. Built in 1949, the EDSAC used a mercury delay line memory. He is also known as the author, with Wheeler and Gill, of a volume on "Preparation of Programs for Electronic Digital Computers" in 1951, in which program libraries were effectively introduced[11]
1968	Richard Hamming	For his work on numerical methods, automatic coding systems, and error-detecting and error-correcting codes[12]
1969	Marvin Minsky	For his central role in creating, shaping, promoting, and advancing the field of artificial intelligence.[13]
1970	James H. Wilkinson	For his research in numerical analysis to facilitate the use of the high-speed digital computer, having received special recognition for his work in computations in linear algebra and "backward" error analysis[14]
1971	John McCarthy	McCarthy's lecture "The Present State of Research on Artificial Intelligence" is a topic that covers the area in which he has achieved considerable recognition for his work[15]
1972	Edsger W. Dijkstra	Edsger Dijkstra was a principal contributor in the late 1950s to the development of the ALGOL, a high level programming language which has become a model of clarity and mathematical rigor. He is one of the principal proponents of the science and art of programming languages in general, and has greatly contributed to our understanding of their structure, representation, and implementation. His fifteen years of publications extend from theoretical articles on graph theory to basic manuals, expository texts, and philosophical contemplations in the field of programming languages[16]
1973	Charles W. Bachman	For his outstanding contributions to database technology[17]
1974	Donald E. Knuth	For his major contributions to the analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages, and in particular for his contributions to "The Art of Computer Programming" through his well-known books in a continuous series by this title[18]
1975	Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon	In joint scientific efforts extending over twenty years, initially in collaboration with J. C. Shaw at the RAND Corporation, and subsequentially [sic] with numerous faculty and student colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, they have made basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing[19]
1976	Michael O. Rabin and Dana S. Scott	For their joint paper "Finite Automata and Their Decision Problem,"[20] which introduced the idea of nondeterministic machines, which has proved to be an enormously valuable concept. Their (Scott & Rabin) classic paper has been a continuous source of inspiration for subsequent work in this field[21][22]
1977	John Backus	For profound, influential, and lasting contributions to the design of practical high-level programming systems, notably through his work on FORTRAN, and for seminal publication of formal procedures for the specification of programming languages[23]
1978	Robert W. Floyd	For having a clear influence on methodologies for the creation of efficient and reliable software, and for helping to found the following important subfields of computer science: the theory of parsing, the semantics of programming languages, automatic program verification, automatic program synthesis, and analysis of algorithms[24]
1979	Kenneth E. Iverson	For his pioneering effort in programming languages and mathematical notation resulting in what the computing field now knows as APL, for his contributions to the implementation of interactive systems, to educational uses of APL, and to programming language theory and practice[25]
1980	Tony Hoare	For his fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages[26]
1981	Edgar F. Codd	For his fundamental and continuing contributions to the theory and practice of database management systems, esp. relational databases[27]
1982	Stephen A. Cook	For his advancement of our understanding of the complexity of computation in a significant and profound way[28]
1983	Ken Thompson and Dennis M. Ritchie	For their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system
1984	Niklaus Wirth	For developing a sequence of innovative computer languages, EULER, ALGOL-W, MODULA and Pascal
1985	Richard M. Karp	For his continuing contributions to the theory of algorithms including the development of efficient algorithms for network flow and other combinatorial optimization problems, the identification of polynomial-time computability with the intuitive notion of algorithmic efficiency, and, most notably, contributions to the theory of NP-completeness
1986	John Hopcroft and Robert Tarjan	For fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures
1987	John Cocke	For significant contributions in the design and theory of compilers, the architecture of large systems and the development of reduced instruction set computers (RISC)
1988	Ivan Sutherland	For his pioneering and visionary contributions to computer graphics, starting with Sketchpad, and continuing after
1989	William Kahan	For his fundamental contributions to numerical analysis. One of the foremost experts on floating-point computations. Kahan has dedicated himself to "making the world safe for numerical computations."
1990	Fernando J. Corbató	For his pioneering work organizing the concepts and leading the development of the general-purpose, large-scale, time-sharing and resource-sharing computer systems, CTSS and Multics.
1991	Robin Milner	For three distinct and complete achievements: 1) LCF, the mechanization of Scott's Logic of Computable Functions, probably the first theoretically based yet practical tool for machine assisted proof construction; 2) ML, the first language to include polymorphic type inference together with a type-safe exception-handling mechanism; 3) CCS, a general theory of concurrency. In addition, he formulated and strongly advanced full abstraction, the study of the relationship between operational and denotational semantics.[29]
1992	Butler W. Lampson	For contributions to the development of distributed, personal computing environments and the technology for their implementation: workstations, networks, operating systems, programming systems, displays, security and document publishing.
1993	Juris Hartmanis and Richard E. Stearns	In recognition of their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory.[30]
1994	Edward Feigenbaum and Raj Reddy	For pioneering the design and construction of large scale artificial intelligence systems, demonstrating the practical importance and potential commercial impact of artificial intelligence technology.[31]
1995	Manuel Blum	In recognition of his contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its application to cryptography and program checking.
1996	Amir Pnueli	For seminal work introducing temporal logic into computing science and for outstanding contributions to program and systems verification.
1997	Douglas Engelbart	For an inspiring vision of the future of interactive computing and the invention of key technologies to help realize this vision.
1998	Jim Gray	For seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation.
1999	Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.	For landmark contributions to computer architecture, operating systems, and software engineering.
2000	Andrew Chi-Chih Yao	In recognition of his fundamental contributions to the theory of computation, including the complexity-based theory of pseudorandom number generation, cryptography, and communication complexity.
2001	Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard	For ideas fundamental to the emergence of object-oriented programming, through their design of the programming languages Simula I and Simula 67.
2002	Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard M. Adleman	For their ingenious contribution for making public-key cryptography useful in practice.
2003	Alan Kay	For pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing.
2004	Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn	For pioneering work on internetworking, including the design and implementation of the Internet's basic communications protocols, TCP/IP, and for inspired leadership in networking.
2005	Peter Naur	For fundamental contributions to programming language design and the definition of ALGOL 60, to compiler design, and to the art and practice of computer programming.
2006	Frances E. Allen	For pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of optimizing compiler techniques that laid the foundation for modern optimizing compilers and automatic parallel execution.
2007	Edmund M. Clarke, E. Allen Emerson and Joseph Sifakis	For their roles in developing model checking into a highly effective verification technology, widely adopted in the hardware and software industries.[32]
2008	Barbara Liskov	For contributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing.
2009	Charles P. Thacker	For his pioneering design and realization of the Xerox Alto, the first modern personal computer, and in addition for his contributions to the Ethernet and the Tablet PC.
2010	Leslie G. Valiant	For transformative contributions to the theory of computation, including the theory of probably approximately correct (PAC) learning, the complexity of enumeration and of algebraic computation, and the theory of parallel and distributed computing.
2011	Judea Pearl[33]	For fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning.[34]
2012	Silvio Micali Shafi Goldwasser	For transformative work that laid the complexity-theoretic foundations for the science of cryptography and in the process pioneered new methods for efficient verification of mathematical proofs in complexity theory.[35]
2013	Leslie Lamport	For fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of distributed and concurrent systems, notably the invention of concepts such as causality and logical clocks, safety and liveness, replicated state machines, and sequential consistency.[36][37]
2014	Michael Stonebraker	For fundamental contributions to the concepts and practices underlying modern database systems.[38]
2015	Martin E. Hellman Whitfield Diffie	For fundamental contributions to modern cryptography. Diffie and Hellman's groundbreaking 1976 paper, "New Directions in Cryptography,"[39] introduced the ideas of public-key cryptography and digital signatures, which are the foundation for most regularly-used security protocols on the internet today.[40]

See also

• List of prizes, medals and awards
• List of prizes named after people
• IEEE John von Neumann Medal
• List of Turing Award laureates by university affiliation
• Turing Lecture
• Nobel Prize
• Schock Prize
• Nevanlinna Prize

References

1. Cacm Staff (2014). "ACM's Turing Award prize raised to $1 million". Communications of the ACM 57 (12): 20. doi:10.1145/2685372.
2. "A. M. Turing Award". ACM. Retrieved 2007-11-05.
3. Dasgupta, Sanjoy; Papadimitriou, Christos; Vazirani, Umesh (2008). Algorithms. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-352340-8., p. 317.
4. Bibliography of Turing Award lectures, DBLP
5. Steven Geringer (27 July 2007). "ACM'S Turing Award Prize Raised To $250,000". ACM press release. Retrieved 2008-10-16.
6. See also: Brown, Bob (June 6, 2011). "Why there's no Nobel Prize in Computing". Network World. Retrieved June 3, 2015.
7. Homer, Steven and Alan L. (2001). Computability and Complexity Theory. Springer via Google Books limited view. p. 35. ISBN 0-387-95055-9. Retrieved 2007-11-05.
8. "ACM's Turing Award Prize Raised to $1 Million". ACM. Retrieved 2014-11-13.
9. "First Woman to Receive ACM Turing Award" (Press release). The Association for Computing Machinery. February 21, 2007. Retrieved 2007-11-05.
10. Perlis, A. J. (1967). "The Synthesis of Algorithmic Systems". Journal of the ACM 14: 1. doi:10.1145/321371.321372.
11. Wilkes, M. V. (1968). "Computers then and Now". Journal of the ACM 15: 1. doi:10.1145/321439.321440.
12. Hamming, R. W. (1969). "One Man's View of Computer Science". Journal of the ACM 16: 3. doi:10.1145/321495.321497.
13. Minsky, M. (1970). "Form and Content in Computer Science (1970 ACM turing lecture)". Journal of the ACM 17 (2): 197. doi:10.1145/321574.321575.
14. Wilkinson, J. H. (1971). "Some Comments from a Numerical Analyst". Journal of the ACM 18 (2): 137. doi:10.1145/321637.321638.
15. McCarthy, J. (1987). "Generality in artificial intelligence". Communications of the ACM 30 (12): 1030. doi:10.1145/33447.33448.
16. Dijkstra, E. W. (1972). "The humble programmer". Communications of the ACM 15 (10): 859. doi:10.1145/355604.361591.
17. Bachman, C. W. (1973). "The programmer as navigator". Communications of the ACM 16 (11): 653. doi:10.1145/355611.362534.
18. Knuth, D. E. (1974). "Computer programming as an art". Communications of the ACM 17 (12): 667. doi:10.1145/361604.361612.
19. Newell, A.; Simon, H. A. (1976). "Computer science as empirical inquiry: Symbols and search". Communications of the ACM 19 (3): 113. doi:10.1145/360018.360022.
20. Rabin, M. O.; Scott, D. (1959). "Finite Automata and Their Decision Problems". IBM Journal of Research and Development 3 (2): 114. doi:10.1147/rd.32.0114.
21. Rabin, M. O. (1977). "Complexity of computations". Communications of the ACM 20 (9): 625. doi:10.1145/359810.359816.
22. Scott, D. S. (1977). "Logic and programming languages". Communications of the ACM 20 (9): 634. doi:10.1145/359810.359826.
23. Backus, J. (1978). "Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style?: A functional style and its algebra of programs". Communications of the ACM 21 (8): 613. doi:10.1145/359576.359579.
24. Floyd, R. W. (1979). "The paradigms of programming". Communications of the ACM 22 (8): 455. doi:10.1145/359138.359140.
25. Iverson, K. E. (1980). "Notation as a tool of thought". Communications of the ACM 23 (8): 444. doi:10.1145/358896.358899.
26. Hoare, C. A. R. (1981). "The emperor's old clothes". Communications of the ACM 24 (2): 75. doi:10.1145/358549.358561.
27. Codd, E. F. (1982). "Relational database: A practical foundation for productivity". Communications of the ACM 25 (2): 109. doi:10.1145/358396.358400.
28. Cook, S. A. (1983). "An overview of computational complexity". Communications of the ACM 26 (6): 400. doi:10.1145/358141.358144.
29. Milner, R. (1993). "Elements of interaction: Turing award lecture". Communications of the ACM 36: 78–89. doi:10.1145/151233.151240.
30. Stearns, R. E. (1994). "Turing Award lecture: It's time to reconsider time". Communications of the ACM 37 (11): 95. doi:10.1145/188280.188379.
31. Reddy, R. (1996). "To dream the possible dream". Communications of the ACM 39 (5): 105. doi:10.1145/229459.233436.
32. 2007 Turing Award Winners Announced
33. Pearl, Judea (2011). "The Mechanization of Causal Inference: A "mini" Turing Test and Beyond" (mp4). ACM Turing award lectures (ACM). doi:10.1145/1283920.2351636 (inactive 2016-01-28). ISBN 978-1-4503-1049-9.
34. "Judea Pearl". ACM.
35. "Turing award 2012". ACM.
36. "Turing award 2013". ACM.
37. Lamport, L. (1978). "Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system" (PDF). Communications of the ACM 21 (7): 558–565. doi:10.1145/359545.359563.
38. "Turing award 2014". ACM.
39. Diffie, W.; Hellman, M. (1976). "New directions in cryptography" (PDF). IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 22 (6): 644–654. doi:10.1109/TIT.1976.1055638.
40. "Cryptography Pioneers Receive 2015 ACM A.M. Turing Award". ACM.

External links

• ACM List of Turing Laureates
• Visualizing Turing Award Laureates