Pnuelin Wines Turing Award

Amir Pnueli, a professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, received the Association for Computing Machinery's 1996 A.M. Turing Award in March. Pnueli was honored "for seminal work introducing temporal logic into computing science and for outstanding contributions to program and system verification," an ACM announcement said. His landmark 1977 paper "The Temporal Logic of Programs" resulted in a major breakthrough in the verification and certification of concurrent and reactive systems.

The ACM A.M. Turing Award is given annually for technical achievements in the field of computing deemed by a jury of leading professionals to be of lasting and significant importance to the computing community. It is accompanied by a prize of $25,000, contributed by Lucent Technologies Inc. Also, Peter J. Denning, associate dean for computing and chair of the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University, received the 1996 Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award. Denning was honored for his long-standing efforts to shape the computing field and convey its nature to computer scientists and the broader scientific community. This annual award recognizes an outstanding educator for advancements in teaching methods and for effecting new CS&E curriculum development. It carries a prize of $5,000, which is supplied by the Prentice-Hall Publishing Co.

Other 1996 ACM award winners include:

Distinguished Service Award. Awarded on the basis of value and degree of service to the computing community.
Winner: Hal Berghel, University of Arkansas.

Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award. The award is given to individuals selected on the value and degree of service to ACM.
Winner: Robert M. Aiken, Temple University.

Grace Murray Hopper Award. Awarded to the outstanding young computer professional of the year.
Winner: Shafrira Goldwasser, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award.
This new award honors specific theoretical accomplishments that had a significant and demonstrable effect on the practice of computing.
Winners: Leonard Adleman, University of Southern California; Whitfield Diffie, Sun Microsystems Inc.; Martin Hellman, Stanford University; Ralph Merkle, Xerox Corp.; Ronald Rivest, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Adi Shamir, Weizmann Institute of Science (the six founders of public-key cryptography).

Doctoral Dissertation Award. Presented annually to the author(s) of the best doctoral dissertation(s) in computer science and engineering. The award includes $1,000 and publication of the dissertation(s) by Springer-Verlag.
Winners: Xiaoyuan Tu, University of Toronto, and Carl Waldspurger, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.