CMU Faculty and Students Honored at ACM Awards Banquet
I’m on my way back from San Francisco, where a large contingent of CMU faculty and students (and assorted friends and family members) was attending the gala ACM awards banquet. The ACM does a very nice job with this black-tie affair, and last night was a particularly nice one for CMU.
The main attraction was the Turing Award, which was officially presented to Ed Clarke, E. Allen Emerson, and Joseph Sifakis. Ed gave a a touching acceptance speech, citing the importance of his interactions with Emerson (Ed’s graduate student at the time the early research was being done) and Sifakis (who said that he still has some of the original hand-written letters that Ed wrote to him 25 years ago), as well as the 79 (!) graduate students, postdocs, and visiting scientists he has hosted over the years. Ed also explained how his work probably could not have flourished as well at any school other than CMU — something that I’m not sure is really true, but this is still a very nice thing to hear.
Ed’s entire family was in attendance, including his wife, Martha, and his three sons (two PhDs and one MD!). Here is a somewhat grainy photo (taken with no flash on my iPhone) of Martha and Ed, clutching the coveted award, right after receiving it.
It was very nice to see so many good friends and colleagues at the event. So many of them have strong CMU connections, such as Rick and Terri Rashid, Dana and Irena Scott, Alfred Spector, Bud Mishra, Dawn Song, and many others. And, of course, several current faculty members were also there, including Bruce Maggs and Dave Andersen. Randy Bryant, of course, was in attendance. He accepted the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for Randy Pausch, giving a very nice acceptance speech “on behalf of two Randys”. Here is a picture of Randy, sitting with Dawn Song and Bruce Maggs.
Of the many great awards given to CMU people (including not only the Turing and Karlstrom awards, but also the ACM Fellow awards to Avrim Blum and Randy Pausch), I was particularly proud of the Honorable Mention in the ACM Doctoral Dissertation awards given to Vincent Conitzer (now at Duke) and Yan Liu (now at IBM Research). Only three Honorable Mentions were given, and so two of the three going to CMU students is really reflects well on our program. (The Doctoral Dissertation Award went to Segey Yakhanin, of MIT.)
Here is a picture of Yan and Vincent, along with fellow student Mugizi Rwebangira:
All in all, it was a great night. Lots of “rubbing elbows” with the movers and shakers in the computing community, and an amazingly strong showing by Carnegie Mellon Computer Science.
Peter Lee @ June 22, 2008