The Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award is granted yearly by the Association for Computing Machinery

Association for Computing Machinery

The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...

 (ACM) to honor specific theoretical accomplishments that have had a significant and demonstrable effect on the practice of computing. It was instituted in memory of the computer scientist

Computer scientist

A computer scientist is a scientist who has acquired knowledge of computer science, the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their application in computer systems....

 Paris Kanellakis

Paris Kanellakis

Paris Christos Kanellakis was a computer scientist.Kanellakis was born in Greece as the only child of General Eleftherios and Mrs. Argyroula Kanellakis. In 1976, he received a diploma in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens...

, who died with his immediate family in an airplane crash in South America in 1995 (American Airlines Flight 965

American Airlines Flight 965

American Airlines Flight 965, a Boeing 757 registered , was a scheduled flight from Miami International Airport in Miami, Florida to Alfonso Bonilla Aragón International Airport in Cali, Colombia, which crashed into a mountain in Buga, Colombia on December 20, 1995, killing 151 passengers and 8...

). The award is accompanied by a prize of $5,000 and is endowed by contributions from the Kanellakis family, with additional financial support provided by ACM's Special Interest Groups on Algorithms and Computational Theory (SIGACT), Design Automaton (SIGDA

SIGDA

SIGDA, Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Design Automation, is a professional development organization for the Electronic Design Automation community. SIGDA is organized and operated exclusively for educational, scientific, and technical purposes in electronic design...

), Management of Data (SIGMOD

SIGMOD

SIGMOD is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Management of Data, which specializes in large-scale data management problems and databases....

), and Programming Languages (SIGPLAN

SIGPLAN

SIGPLAN is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on programming languages.- Conferences :* Principles of Programming Languages * Programming Language Design and Implementation...

), the ACM SIG Projects Fund, and individual contributions.

Awards

• The 1996 award was split among six researchers who together founded the theory of public key cryptography: Leonard Adleman
  Leonard Adleman
  Leonard Max Adleman is an American theoretical computer scientist and professor of computer science and molecular biology at the University of Southern California. He is known for being a co-inventor of the RSA cryptosystem in 1977, and of DNA computing...
  
  , Whitfield Diffie
  Whitfield Diffie
  Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie is an American cryptographer and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography.Diffie and Martin Hellman's paper New Directions in Cryptography was published in 1976...
  
  , Martin Hellman
  Martin Hellman
  Martin Edward Hellman is an American cryptologist, and is best known for his invention of public key cryptography in cooperation with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle...
  
  , Ralph Merkle
  Ralph Merkle
  Ralph C. Merkle is a researcher in public key cryptography, and more recently a researcher and speaker on molecular nanotechnology and cryonics...
  
  , Ronald Rivest, and Adi Shamir
  Adi Shamir
  Adi Shamir is an Israeli cryptographer. He is a co-inventor of the RSA algorithm , a co-inventor of the Feige–Fiat–Shamir identification scheme , one of the inventors of differential cryptanalysis and has made numerous contributions to the fields of cryptography and computer...
  
  .
• In 1997, the award was given to Abraham Lempel
  Abraham Lempel
  Abraham Lempel is an Israeli computer scientist and one of the fathers of the LZ family of lossless data compression algorithms.Lempel was born on 10 February 1936 in Lwów, Poland . He studied at Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, and received a B.Sc. in 1963, M.Sc. in 1965, and D.Sc. in...
  
   and Jacob Ziv
  Jacob Ziv
  Jacob Ziv is an Israeli computer scientist who, along with Abraham Lempel, developed the LZ family of lossless data compression algorithms.-Biography:...
  
   for their pioneering work in data compression
  Data compression
  In computer science and information theory, data compression, source coding or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation would use....
  
  .
• The 1998 award was given for the development of model checking
  Model checking
  In computer science, model checking refers to the following problem:Given a model of a system, test automatically whether this model meets a given specification....
  
  , by Randal Bryant
  Randal Bryant
  Randal E. Bryant is an American computer scientist and academic noted for his research on formally verifying digital hardware, and more recently some forms of software...
  
  , Edmund M. Clarke
  Edmund M. Clarke
  Edmund Melson Clarke, Jr. is a computer scientist and academic noted for developingmodel checking, a method for formally verifying hardware and software designs....
  
  , E. Allen Emerson
  E. Allen Emerson
  Ernest Allen Emerson is a computer scientist and endowed professor at the University of Texas, Austin, USA.He won the 2007 A.M. Turing Award along with Edmund M...
  
  , and Kenneth L. McMillan.
• The ACM gave the 1999 award to Daniel Sleator
  Daniel Sleator
  Daniel Dominic Kaplan Sleator is a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. He discovered amortized analysis and he invented many data structures with Robert Tarjan, such as splay trees, link/cut trees, and skew heaps. He also pioneered the theory of link grammars and developed...
  
   and Robert Tarjan
  Robert Tarjan
  Robert Endre Tarjan is a renowned American computer scientist. He is the discoverer of several important graph algorithms, including Tarjan's off-line least common ancestors algorithm, and co-inventor of both splay trees and Fibonacci heaps. Tarjan is currently the James S...
  
   for the splay tree
  Splay tree
  A splay tree is a self-adjusting binary search tree with the additional property that recently accessed elements are quick to access again. It performs basic operations such as insertion, look-up and removal in O amortized time. For many sequences of nonrandom operations, splay trees perform...
  
   data structure.
• Narendra Karmarkar
  Narendra Karmarkar
  Narendra K. Karmarkar is an Indian mathematician, renowned for developing Karmarkar's algorithm. He is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher.- Biography :...
  
   won the 2000 award, for his discovery of polynomial time interior point method
  Interior point method
  Interior point methods are a certain class of algorithms to solve linear and nonlinear convex optimization problems.The interior point method was invented by John von Neumann...
  
  s for linear programming
  Linear programming
  Linear programming is a mathematical method for determining a way to achieve the best outcome in a given mathematical model for some list of requirements represented as linear relationships...
  
  .
• In 2001, the ACM honored Eugene Myers
  Eugene Myers
  Eugene "Gene" Wimberly Myers, Jr. is an American computer scientist and bioinformatician, who is best known for his development of the NCBI's BLAST tool for sequence analysis. His 1990 paper describing BLAST has received over 24000 citations making it among the most highly cited papers ever...
  
   for his contribution of software and algorithms for genome sequencing.
• The 2002 award went to Peter Franaszek
  Peter Franaszek
  Peter A. Franaszek is an American information theorist, an IEEE fellow, a research staff member emeritus at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and a former member of the IBM Academy of Technology. He received his Sc.B. from Brown University in 1962, and his Ph.D...
  
   for his work on constrained channel coding
  8B/10B encoding
  In telecommunications, 8b/10b is a line code that maps 8-bit symbols to 10-bit symbols to achieve DC-balance and bounded disparity, and yet provide enough state changes to allow reasonable clock recovery. This means that the difference between the count of 1s and 0s in a string of at least 20 bits...
  
  .
• In 2003, the ACM honored the developers of randomized primality test
  Primality test
  A primality test is an algorithm for determining whether an input number is prime. Amongst other fields of mathematics, it is used for cryptography. Unlike integer factorization, primality tests do not generally give prime factors, only stating whether the input number is prime or not...
  
  s used in public key cryptography: Gary Miller
  Gary Miller (professor)
  Gary Lee Miller is a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, United States. In 2003, he won the ACM Paris Kanellakis Award for the Miller–Rabin primality test. He was also made an ACM Fellow in 2002....
  
  , Michael Rabin
  Michael Rabin
  Michael Rabin may refer to:*Michael O. Rabin , computer scientist*Michael Rabin...
  
  , Robert Solovay, and Volker Strassen
  Volker Strassen
  Volker Strassen is a German mathematician, a professor emeritus in the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Konstanz.-Biography:Strassen was born on April 29, 1936, in Düsseldorf-Gerresheim....
  
  , for their work on the Miller–Rabin and Solovay–Strassen primality tests.
• Yoav Freund
  Yoav Freund
  Yoav Freund is a researcher and professor at the University of California, San Diego who mainly works on machine learning, probability theory and related fields and applications.From his homepage:...
  
   and Robert Schapire
  Robert Schapire
  Robert Elias Schapire is a professor and researcher in the computer science department at Princeton University. His primary specialty is theoretical and applied machine learning....
  
   won the 2004 award for AdaBoost
  AdaBoost
  AdaBoost, short for Adaptive Boosting, is a machine learning algorithm, formulated by Yoav Freund and Robert Schapire. It is a meta-algorithm, and can be used in conjunction with many other learning algorithms to improve their performance. AdaBoost is adaptive in the sense that subsequent...
  
  , a machine learning
  Machine learning
  Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, is a scientific discipline concerned with the design and development of algorithms that allow computers to evolve behaviors based on empirical data, such as from sensor data or databases...
  
   algorithm.
• The ACM honored four researchers in 2005, for their work on formal verification
  Formal verification
  In the context of hardware and software systems, formal verification is the act of proving or disproving the correctness of intended algorithms underlying a system with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal methods of mathematics .- Usage :Formal verification can be...
  
   of reactive systems: Gerard Holzmann, Robert Kurshan, Moshe Y. Vardi
  Moshe Y. Vardi
  Moshe Ya'akov Vardi is a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University, USA. He is the Karen Ostrum George Professor in Computational Engineering, Distinguished Service Professor, and Director of the Computer and Information Technology Institute...
  
  , and Pierre Wolper.
• The winner of the 2006 award was Robert Brayton. He was honored for his work in logic synthesis
  Logic synthesis
  In electronics, logic synthesis is a process by which an abstract form of desired circuit behavior, typically register transfer level , is turned into a design implementation in terms of logic gates. Common examples of this process include synthesis of HDLs, including VHDL and Verilog...
  
   and simulation
  Simulation
  Simulation is the imitation of some real thing available, state of affairs, or process. The act of simulating something generally entails representing certain key characteristics or behaviours of a selected physical or abstract system....
  
   of electronic systems
  Electronics
  Electronics is the branch of science, engineering and technology that deals with electrical circuits involving active electrical components such as vacuum tubes, transistors, diodes and integrated circuits, and associated passive interconnection technologies...
  
  .
• The winner of the 2007 award was Bruno Buchberger
  Bruno Buchberger
  Bruno Buchberger is Professor of Computer Mathematics at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. In his 1965 Ph.D. thesis, he created the theory of Gröbner bases, and has developed this theory throughout his career. He named these objects after his advisor Wolfgang Gröbner...
  
   for his work in "developing the theory of Gröbner bases into a highly effective tool in computer algebra".
• The winners of the 2008 award were Corinna Cortes
  Corinna Cortes
  Corinna Cortes is an American computer scientist who is known for her contributions to the field of machine learning. She is currently the Head of Google Research, New York. Cortes is a recipient of the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for her work on theoretical foundations of support...
  
   and Vladimir Vapnik
  Vladimir Vapnik
  Vladimir Naumovich Vapnik is one of the main developers of Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory. He was born in the Soviet Union. He received his master's degree in mathematics at the Uzbek State University, Samarkand, Uzbek SSR in 1958 and Ph.D in statistics at the Institute of Control Sciences, Moscow in...
  
   for their development of Support vector machine
  Support vector machine
  A support vector machine is a concept in statistics and computer science for a set of related supervised learning methods that analyze data and recognize patterns, used for classification and regression analysis...
  
  s.
• The winners of the 2009 award were Mihir Bellare
  Mihir Bellare
  Mihir Bellare is a cryptographer and professor at the University of California, San Diego. He has published several seminal papers in the field of cryptography , many coauthored with Phillip Rogaway. Bellare has published a number of papers in the field of Format-Preserving Encryption...
  
   and Phillip Rogaway
  Phillip Rogaway
  Phillip Rogaway is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis. He graduated with an BA in computer science from UC Berkeley and completed his PhD in cryptography at MIT, in the Theory of Computation group. He has taught at UC Davis since 1994.Dr...
  
   for "their development of the field of Practice-Oriented Provable-Security and its widespread impact on the theory and practice of cryptography and security".
• Kurt Mehlhorn
  Kurt Mehlhorn
  Kurt Mehlhorn is a German computer scientist. He has been a vice president of the Max Planck Society and is director of the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science.-Education:...
  
   won the 2010 award for his "contributions to algorithm engineering by creating the LEDA library for algorithmic problem solving".