Thursday, January 12, 2006

2005 ACM Fellows

ACM has announced their list of 2005 Fellows. Two AT&T researchers are on the list: Walter Willinger and Mikkel Thorup. A number of theory/algorithms folks have been named fellows: Umesh and Vijay Vazirani, Maurice Herlihy, Phokion Kolaitis, Krishna Palem, Eli Upfal (and of course Mikkel).

Congratulations to all the winners ! In the horse-race analysis of the awards, CMU came out on top with 3 fellows, followed by many double winners (including AT&T).
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7 comments:

  1. Manuel Blum, Les Valiant and Michael Rabin are
    not yet ACM Fellows while many other theoreticians
    are. What gives?

    Posted by Anonymous

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's a good question. Blum/Rabin are Turing Award winners, and I'd imagine that Les Valiant should be on the short list for one. Arguably, getting a Turing Award takes away some of the bite of not being made a Fellow :) 

    Posted by Suresh

    ReplyDelete
  3. The number and quality of the recipients has gone up and down over the years. There are spans of several years where it seems all you needed to do was ask, while there are others, such as the last two, in which the bar seems to have been set quite high. Also with the ACM being an American based organization, US-based researchers are naturally a bit overrepresented. 

    Posted by Anonymous

    ReplyDelete
  4. Note that you have to be a member of the ACM (and be nominated) in order to become a Fellow (this answers a prior question about turing award winnners). As for ACM being a US organization and overweighting US researchers, this is also a side effect of the membership constraint I imagine. Why would a researcher in Europe or Asia need to become an ACM member ?  

    Posted by Suresh

    ReplyDelete
  5. Suresh and Anonymous,

    I believe that once you've won award A that's considered more prestigious than award B, you're typically not nominated for award B. One interpretation of "more prestigious" is "drawn from a wider pool of potential nominees". One reason to not aspire for that Turing award too soon -- you won't be eligible for the Knuth prize, ACM Fellow award, etc.

    Siva 

    Posted by Anonymous

    ReplyDelete
  6. I stand corrected btw. I am informed that ACM has an international membership and sponsors international events like the ACM programming contest. So there *is* an incentive for non-US-based researchers to be members of the ACM.  

    Posted by Suresh

    ReplyDelete
  7. Sure, it is not completely pointless as a foreigner to be part of the ACM, but its international slant has always been more on paper than on practice. This came to the fore when ACM opposed H1-B visas a while back and only later was it pointed out to them that in fact most of its international membership would be in favour of them. While I'm not privy to the details shortly thereafter ACM-USA was created and that chapter took over on that issue.

    As a European I think membership in EATCS would be the first order of the day and then ACM would be an afterthought. 

    Posted by Anonymous

    ReplyDelete

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