About ACM Luiz André Barroso Award

ACM named Ricardo Baeza-Yates as the recipient of the 2025 ACM Luiz André Barroso Award, recognizing his pioneering contributions to algorithms and information retrieval as well as his leadership in fostering a vibrant transnational research community across Latin America.

The ACM Luiz André Barroso Award recognizes researchers from historically underrepresented communities who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. The award is named after Luiz André Barroso, a Brazilian computer engineer who pioneered the design of the modern data center. Barroso, who grew up in a diverse community, was a strong supporter of equal opportunity for everyone.

Technical Contributions
Baeza-Yates is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost researchers in information retrieval, celebrated especially for pioneering innovative data structures that have shaped the field. His work has produced influential algorithms for string searching and fuzzy matching, including the well-known Shift-Or algorithm. Over the course of a prolific career, Baeza-Yates has authored more than 500 highly cited papers and co-written several books. His textbook, Modern Information Retrieval (co-authored with Berthier Ribeiro-Neto), remains the most widely used and authoritative reference in the discipline.

Building the Latin American Computing Community 
Baeza-Yates has played a pivotal role in strengthening the Latin American computing community. At the University of Chile, he was the founding director of the Center for Web Research which became a hub for attracting top talent and supporting young researchers. The efforts of Baeza-Yates and others gradually led to a vibrant technology sector in Chile—reflected in today’s moniker of “Chilecon Valley.”

Later, as President of the Centro Latinoamericano de Estudios en Informática (CLEI), he led the association of computing science departments in Latin America. He also was one of the coordinators of the Ibero-American cooperation program in science and technology for development (CYTED). He also co-founded two of Latin America’s most influential research conferences—String Processing and Information Retrieval Symposium (SPIRE), focused on string processing (now an international meeting), and the Alberto Mendelzon Workshop (AMW), dedicated to databases and web research.

During this decade, he has focused on responsible AI, being one of the leading authors of ACM’s Principles for Responsible Algorithmic Systems published in October 2022. He is currently a member of several technology policy committees including ACM, IEEE, OECD, and WEF.

A respected mentor, Baeza-ates has advised 34 PhD students, many from Latin America, with 50% of them female, 53% from Latin America, and 68% from developing countries. Young people have also been excited and inspired by the South American Programming Contest which he helped to bootstrap. Launched in 1996, the Contest held its 30th competition in 2025.

Ricardo 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. As a practitioner, Baeza-Yates served as VP of Research for Yahoo Labs, secured 14 patents, and co-founded several startups in Chile and Spain, the latest one Theodora AI, devoted to mitigating technological bias.

Baeza-Yates is an engineering graduate of the Universidad de Chile, where he also earned Master’s Degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. He earned a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo. Among his honors, Baeza-Yates received the CLEI Distinction for Contributions to Computing in Latin America in 2009, the Spanish “Ángela Ruiz Robles” Award for research excellence and entrepreneurship in applied computing in 2018, the 2024 Chilean National Prize for Applied Sciences and Technology, and the first Merit Award from the Chilean Computing Science Society in 2025. He is a member of Academia Europaea, and a Fellow of ACM and IEEE.

ACM named Rachid Guerraoui the recipient of the inaugural ACM Luiz André Barroso Award for theoretical and applied contributions to distributed computing and impactful work on promoting computer science in Africa. Guerraoui is a Professor in the School of Computer and Communications Sciences at EPFL, where he is also Director of the Distributed Computing Laboratory.

The ACM Luiz André Barroso Award was established to recognize researchers from historically underrepresented communities who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. The award is named after Luiz André Barroso, a Brazilian computer engineer who pioneered the design of the modern data center. Barroso, who grew up in a diverse community, was a strong supporter of equal opportunity for everyone.

Technical Contributions
Rachid Guerraoui has made groundbreaking contributions that have shaped the landscape of distributed computing. Distributed computing is the process of making multiple computers in different locations work together to solve a common problem. A common thread that runs through Guerraoui’s work is providing principled theoretical and practical foundations for distributed computing mechanisms such as transactional memory, agreement protocols, and asynchronous information dissemination algorithms.

His work on e-Transaction and opacity concepts has provided new insights into managing transactions in concurrent environments. By establishing a theory of Transaction Contention Management and developing STMBench7, he has provided tools and frameworks for understanding and optimizing transaction performance.

Guerraoui proposed effective solutions to distributed agreement problems, which he applied to the realm of cryptocurrency. He demonstrated how to build scalable asynchronous abstractions that can support secure and decentralized digital currencies. Furthermore, his work on asynchronous dissemination protocols has paved the way for fully decentralized publish-subscribe systems, enabling efficient and reliable communication in distributed environments. In recent years, Guerraoui has ventured into the exciting field of Byzantine Machine Learning, which seeks to implement large-scale machine learning algorithms in the presence of machine failures. This work has opened new avenues for research at the intersection of machine learning and distributed computing.

Computing in Africa
Beyond his technical contributions, Guerraoui has also been a passionate advocate for computing education in Africa. Born in Morocco, he has been committed to fostering academic excellence on the African continent. By co-initiating the EPFL’s Excellence in Africa program, for example, Guerraoui has promoted the development of junior faculty and graduate students, providing them with opportunities to excel in their research and careers. The program has benefited researchers from Rwanda, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Cameroon, South Africa, Tanzania, Tunisia, and Morocco. His involvement in the creation of the UM6P College of Computing in Morocco has further expanded access to high-quality computer science education in the region.

Additionally, Guerraoui has played a key role in fostering collaboration and exchange among African computer science researchers through the Netys conference, which he also co-initiated and is held in Morocco. Netys is an exchange forum for African computing researchers who cannot easily travel to the US and Europe because of visas and financial issues.

Rachid Guerraoui is a Professor in the School of Computer and Communications Sciences at EPFL (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne), where he is Director of the Distributed Computing Laboratory. He is also head of the Advisory Board of the UM6P (University Mohammed 6 Polytechnic) College of Computing in Morocco. Guerraoui received an MSc in Computer Science from Sorbonne University, and a PhD in Computer Science from Orsay University.

Guerraoui’s many honors include the Dahl-Nygaard Award (2024), a 10-Year Most Influential Paper Award, and best paper awards from several conferences. Guerraoui was named an ACM Fellow in 2012 for contributions to the theory and practice of reliable distributed computing and Professor of College de France in 2018.