CS faculty and alumni participate in Turing Award 50th Anniversary

The Turing Award 50th Anniversary celebration was held at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco on June 23-24, 2017.   CS Professors Stuart Russell and Michael Jordan participated on a panel discussion about advances in deep neural networks, Prof. Umesh Vazirani moderated a panel on quantum computing.  Prof. Emeritus and Turing winner Michael Stonebraker discussed the legal ramifications of collecting data from a growing number of devices with different encoding formats, and alumnus and Turing winner Butler Lampson (Ph.D. ’67) participated on a panel about the end of Moore’s Law.

The ACM A.M. Turing Award is considered the “Nobel prize of computing,” and comes with a $1 million prize for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to the computing field.   EECS faculty have won four:  Richard Karp for theory and efficiency of algorithms (NP-completeness) in 1985, William Kahan for numerical analysis (floating-point) in 1989, Manuel Blum for computational complexity theory and cryptography in 1995, and Michael Stonebraker for modern database systems in 2014.  EECS alumni have won seven: Ken Thompson (B.S. ’65/M.S. ’66) for operating systems theory (UNIX) in 1983, Niklaus Wirth (Ph.D. ’63) for computer languages (EULER/Pascal, etc.) in 1984, Butler Lampson (Ph.D. ’67) for distributed, personal computing (workstations, networks, etc.) in 1992, Douglas Englebart (MS. ’53/Ph.D. ’55) for interactive computing in 1997, Leonard Adleman (Ph.D. ’76) for public-key cryptography in 2002, and Shafi Goldwasser (M.S. ’81/Ph.D. ’84) with Silvio Micali (Ph.D. ’82) for cryptography and complexity theory in 2012.