The ACM Turing Award is one of the most prestigious awards in the field of computer science, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize in Computing”. It recognizes individuals who have made lasting contributions of a technical nature to the computing community.
- The award is named after Alan M. Turing, a British mathematician considered one of the fathers of modern computing. Turing’s work on codebreaking during World War II, and his subsequent contributions to the theory of computation, laid the foundations for modern computing as we know it today.
- The annual award is presented each June at the ACM Awards Banquet by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a professional society founded in 1947.
- The award carries a prize of $1 million, with financial support provided by Google, Inc., and is accompanied by travel expenses to the banquet.
- Since the award’s inception in 1966, of all computer scientists who have won it, only three have been women. Furthermore, the first female recipient didn’t win until 2006—it took 40 years to recognize a woman. This lack of gender diversity in the Turing Award winners has been a topic of concern in recent years, and efforts are being made to address this issue.
- The Turing Award winners come from diverse backgrounds and have made significant contributions to various fields within computer science.
- For example, Dabbala Rajagopal “Raj” Reddy, an Indian-born American computer scientist, is one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence and has served on the Stanford and Carnegie Mellon faculty for over 50 years. He won the Turing Award in 1994 for his contributions to speech recognition.
- The youngest recipient of the Turing Award was Donald Knuth, who was 36 when he received the award in 1974 for his work on algorithms and computer programming.
- The oldest recipient was Alfred Vaino Aho, who was 79 when he was awarded in 2020 for his work on algorithms and the theory of programming language implementation.
- The Turing Award winners have come from various countries, with USA nationals winning 48, or 63%, of all awards.
- The ACM was founded as the Eastern Association for Computing Machinery at a meeting at Columbia University in New York on September 15, 1947.
- ACM Turing Award is a highly esteemed prize that recognizes the most influential individuals in the field of computer science.
The award has been granted to individuals from a diverse range of backgrounds and has made a significant impact on the field and society. The Turing Award is a testament to the importance of computer science and its role in shaping the world we live in today.