ACM has granted the 2012 awards for innovation in computing, including the Software System Award to LLVM creators.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced six prestigious awards for 2012 for “significant contributions that enable computer science to solve real-world challenges” reflecting “achievements in computer networks, information retrieval, computer science education, multi-agent systems, versatile compiler technologies, and computer-human interactive technologies.”
One of the prizes was Software System Award offered to Vikram S Adve, Evan Cheng, and Chris Lattner for their contribution to the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure project. LLVM is a set of code analysis and transformation tools for arbitrary languages. LLVM technology has bee incorporated in various products created by Apple, Adobe, AMD, Arxan, AutoESL, Cray, Google, Intel, National Instruments, nVidia, REAL Software, XMOS and others. LLVM 3.2 was released in December 2012, and version 3.3 is to be released in the near future.
The ACM Software System Award has been granted since 1983, its recipients being famous names such as Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson for UNIX, Alan Kay for Smalltalk, , Michael Stonebraker for INGRES, Vinton Cerf for TCP/IP, Tim Berners-Lee for WWW, and many others. The complete list is too long to be included here.
Martin Casado and Dina Katabi received the Grace Murray Hopper Award, which is given to the outstanding young computer professional of the year, for creating the Software Defined Networking (SDN) movement. Casado’s contribution was to provide a software alternative to hardware-based network computers using OpenFlow (an open API), OpenVswitch switch, and the NOX and ONIX SDN controllers. Dina Katabi had an important contribution to network congestion control having a new approach to network protocol design.
Andrei Broder, Moses Charikar, and Piotr Indyk received the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) algorithms used to find similar entries in large databases.
Eric Roberts was the recipient of the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for his contribution to Computer Science education. The author of Thinking Recursively, Roberts created an undergraduate computer science program at Stanford and a computing curriculum for public high schools in Bermuda.
Yoav Shoham and Moshe Tennenholtz were the recipients of the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award for their contributions to “multi-agent systems spanning computer science, game theory, and economics.” Shoham pioneered a “methodology for specifying distributed multi-agent systems” while Tennenholtz pioneered “several approaches to the design and analysis of interactions between decision-makers in computational settings.” Tennenholtz also created RMax, an algorithm for learning by interacting with an environment.
Thomas Bartoschek and Johannes Schöning were the recipients of the Eugene L. Lawler Award for "Geoinformatics at School" (GI
School), a program enabling students to “design solutions to problems in their communities by bringing geographic information together with computing and human interaction technologies.”