Today the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) announced its 2014 fellows, and among the awardees were five researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) — more than any other academic institution in the world.
Srini Devadas, Eric Grimson, Robert Morris, Ronitt Rubinfeld, and CSAIL Director Daniela Rus were among the 1 percent of ACM members to receive the distinction, according to the association’s press release.
The ACM fellows, chosen from universities, corporations, and research labs, were selected for contributions that have provided key knowledge to the computing field and generated multiple technology advances in industry, commerce, healthcare, entertainment, and education.
“While it certainly isn’t unprecedented for CSAIL researchers to receive this honor, it is quite remarkable that this year ACM has chosen to recognize five members of our community,” said Daniel Jackson, associate director of CSAIL. “We are extremely proud of our PIs who have been selected to be part of such esteemed company.”
Devadas is the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of EECS, and has been on the MIT faculty since 1988. He has worked extensively in computer-aided design, computer architecture, and computer security. He received an IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement award in 2014 for the invention of Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and single-chip secure processors. PUFs led to the founding of Verayo, Inc., a company that has commercialized secure RFID chips.
Grimson, who serves as MIT’s chancellor for academic advancement, is internationally recognized for research that includes applying computer-vision methods to medical-image analysis, building systems to help neurosurgeons plan and execute surgeries, and designing methods to measure changes in brain structures caused by diseases like schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s. He is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and of the IEEE, and he holds an honorary doctorate from Dalhousie University.
Morris is an EECS professor whose research focuses on networks and operating systems. He has published work on distributed hash tables, wireless mesh networks, and secure operating systems. His recent work involves understanding and improving the multi-core scalability of systems software. He co-founded Y-Combinator and received the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award in 2010.
Rubinfeld is a member of CSAIL’s Theory of Computation group. She initiated the fields of property testing and sublinear-time algorithms that provide the foundations for measuring the performance of algorithms that analyze data without looking at all of it. Her landmark work on linearity testing has helped build bridges between computational complexity, analysis of Boolean functions, and additive combinatorics. Rubinfeld was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2006.
Rus directs CSAIL’s Distributed Robotics Laboratory and is the the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She focuses on furthering the study of networked robotics and how machines can collaborate to achieve a common goal. Her group has built robots that can bake cookies, swim, fly in swarms, and even dance with humans. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2002 and is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the IEEE.
ACM will formally recognize the fellows at its annual awards banquet in San Francisco in June.
Read more about the honorees and their accomplishments on the ACM Fellows site.