ACM Awards

Erdal Arikan, Professor, Bilkent University, receives the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for the discovery of channel polarization and the construction of polar codes—the first explicit, capacity-achieving codes with efficient encoding and decoding adopted in global wireless standards. The transition of polar codes from a profound theoretical milestone to a cornerstone of modern communication infrastructure represents an extraordinary achievement in the field of computing. By bridging the gap between asymptotic theory and practical performance, Arıkan’s discovery moved from academic publication to a global industrial standard within a single decade.

Kevin Leyton-Brown, Professor, University of British Columbia, receives the ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence and machine learning, focusing on applications to multiagent systems, heuristic algorithms, social impact, and market design. Leyton-Brown has made numerous significant contributions to artificial intelligence, specifically in the areas of computational economics and game theory and automatedconfiguration/design of algorithms using machine learning.

Ben Mildenhall, co-founder, W orld Labs, and Pratul Srinivasan, Research Scientist, Google DeepMind, are the recipients of the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award. They are cited for contributions to radiance field representations, 3D scene capture and rendering, and pioneering neural implicit representations and 3D generative AI. Their contributions underpin widely deployed systems in major products including immersive mapping, 3D commerce, and large-scale scene visualization, and have been adopted across leading technology companies.

Yasmin B. Kafai, Professor of Learning Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, and Mitchel J. Resnick, Professor of Learning Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receive the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for long-lasting and collective contributions to creative computing, including Scratch and electronic textiles, developing new ways for young people to create and collaborate within learning communities. Scratch has become the world’s largest coding community for young people, with more than 150 million registered users who have created over 1 billion projects.

Ed Felten, Professor, Princeton University, receives the ACM Policy Award for contributions to technology policy, particularly on electronic voting, copyright, consumer protection, and artificial intelligence. Felten’s security analysis of electronic voting systems fundamentally shifted the national understanding of technological risks in democracy. Furthermore, his research into digital rights management exposed the "chilling effects" that the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act can have on legitimate scientific inquiry. His work has aided policymakers directly, influenced major national debates, and inspired a generation of computer scientists to pursue research with immediate policy relevance.

Jodi Tims, Program Manager, Center for Inclusive Computing, Northeastern University, receives the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award for increasing the worldwide participation of women in ACM and helping to reinforce ACM’s commitment to computing education. Tims was instrumental in expanding the reach of the ACM Committee for Women in Computing (ACM-W) internationally. She led the Celebrations of Women in Computing project, which supports regional conferences of women in technology across industry, academia, and government. Under her leadership as Vice-Chair and Chair of ACM-W, both the Celebrations and student and professional chapters grew significantly, particularly in Europe and India.

ACM President Yannis Ioannidis has recognized Claudia Maria Bauzer Medeiros, Professor, University of Campinas, with the ACM Presidential Award for long-standing and significant contributions to the Brazilian and Latin American computing communities as well as to ACM. She has been a pioneer in the spirit of data-centered interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research. Working with various organizations, she has addressed challenges posed by large, real-world applications, ranging from chemistry, biology, and biodiversity to urban planning, agro-environmental sciences, and social sciences.

ACM President Yannis Ioannidis has recognized Stephen Ibaraki, Futurist Investor, with the ACM Presidential Award for long-standing and considerable contributions to ACM and to the global professional computing community. His numerous volunteer efforts have included establishing the very successful TechTalks series and leading the ACM ByteCast and Professional Development Committees. A co-founder of the United Nations’ “AI for Good” initiative, Ibaraki has helped create one of the world's largest AI innovation programs, showcasing AI solutions across the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals.

ACM President Yannis Ioannidis has recognized Scott Delman and Wayne Graves, both of ACM, with the ACM Presidential Award for long-standing contributions to the broader computing community and to ACM. Delman is honored for significant contributions to the realization of the ACM Open publication model, leading a first-of-its-kind transition of the ACM Digital Library from a paywalled content repository to a comprehensive Open Access offering. Graves is cited for significant contributions to development of the ACM Digital Library, leading the evolution of the ACM Digital Library from an early repository into a modern platform offering a broad set of value-added services and serving as a critical resource for the computing community.

ACM has named Ricardo Baeza-Yates the recipient of the 2025 ACM Luiz André Barroso Award for his pioneering contributions to algorithms and information retrieval as well as his leadership in fostering a vibrant transnational research community across Latin America. Baeza-Yates, a native of Chile, is currently the Search Chief Scientist at You.com, holding part-time professor appointments at KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain) and Universidad de Chile.

ACM has named 71 ACM Fellows for significant contributions to AI for healthcare, computer graphics, data management, electronic mail, human-computer interaction, mobile computing, networked systems, robotics, security, sustainability, and numerous other areas. The ACM Fellows program recognizes the top 1% of ACM Members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community.

ACM has named 61 Distinguished Members for outstanding contributions to the field. All 2025 inductees are longstanding ACM members and were selected by their peers for significant technical achievements as well as volunteer service to their professional community. The ACM Distinguished Member program recognizes up to 10 percent of the worldwide ACM membership based on professional experience and significant achievements in computing beyond the norm.

An eight-member research team has been awarded the 2025 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for their project,“Real-time Bayesian inference at extreme scale: A digital twin for tsunami early warning applied to the Cascadia subduction zone.” Honorable Mention was given to a 10-member team for “Ab-Initio Quantum Transport with the GW Approximation, 42,240 Atoms, and Sustained Exascale Performance.” The ACM Gordon Bell Prize tracks the progress of parallel computing and rewards innovation in applying high-performance computing to challenges in science, engineering, and large-scale data analytics.

ACM presented a 26-member team with the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling for their project, “Computing the Full Earth System at 1 km Resolution.” The team reached a landmark this year by being the first team ever to develop a Full Earth Simulation at 1 km (extremely high) Resolution. The ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling recognizes innovative parallel computing contributions toward solving the global climate crisis. Climate scientists and software engineers are evaluated for the award based on the performance and innovation in their computational methods.

 ACM has named Saman Amarasinghe, Thomas and Gerd Perkins Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as the recipient of the 2025 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award. The Ken Kennedy Award recognizes groundbreaking achievements in parallel and high performance computing. Amarasinghe is cited for fundamental contributions pioneering high-performance domain-specific languages, exceptional mentorship, and service advancing the global computing community.

André Seznec, a Fellow Research Director at INRIA/IRISA and a Fellow at SiFive, is the recipient of the 2025 ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award. Seznec is recognized for his extensive impact on computing, most notably pioneering contributions to branch prediction and cache memories. His inventions can be found in billions of CPUs worldwide. These include the TAGE branch predictor and skewed-associative cache. Seznec’s work has served as a gold standard of branch prediction for the last 15 years, with most current structures in industrial designs rooted in his trailblazing contributions.

Maja Matarić, Professor, University of Southern California, receives the ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics for pioneering socially assistive robotics (SAR) for improving wellness and quality of life for users with special needs. Over the past two decades, Matarić has been the leading figure in the field of socially assistive robotics. These robots are designed to gain insights into the drivers of human behavior related to overcoming challenges. 

In this Tapia Conference panel, ACM CEO Vicki Hanson moderates a discussion with ACM Awards Committee Co-Chair Roy Levin and Awards Committee members Stephanie Ludi and Timothy Pinkston concerning the need to nominate deserving and diverse individuals for Awards and ACM Advanced Member Grades. This panel provides an understanding of ACM’s Awards process from submission to selection, with specific tips for working as a community to develop nominations.