The A.M.N. foundation, Franklin Institute, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and other organizations recently recognized leading computer scientists and technologists.
EMET Prize
David Harel and Sarit Kraus were honored with EMET Prizes by the A.M.N. Foundation for the Advancement of Science, Art, and Culture in Israel for excellence in the computer sciences. Harel, a professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science, was recognized for his studies on a wide variety of topics within the discipline, among them logic and computability, software and systems engineering, graphical structures and visual languages, as well as modeling and analysis of biological systems.
Kraus, a professor of computer science at Bar-Ilan University, was recognized for her expertise in the field of artificial intelligence, along with her significant contributions to the field of autonomous agents, and studies in the field of multiagent systems.
FTC Chief Technologist
Edward Felten, a professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University, was named the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s first Chief Technologist. Felten, a vice-chair of ACM’s U.S. Public Policy Council, will advise the federal agency on evolving technology-related issues of consumer protection, such as online privacy and cybersecurity, and antitrust matters, including tech industry mergers and anticompetitive behavior.
EFF Pioneer Awards
The Electronic Frontier Foundation presented its 2010 Pioneer awards to four individuals who are extending freedom and innovation in the digital world. The honorees are:
Steven Aftergood, who directs the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy, which works to reduce the scope of official secrecy and to promote public access to government information;
James Boyle, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law and cofounder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School, who was recognized for his scholarship on the “second enclosure movement”—the worldwide expansion of intellectual property rights—and its threat to the public domain of cultural and scientific materials that the Internet might otherwise make available;
Pamela Jones, a blogger, and her Web site Groklaw, were honored for the creation of a new style of participatory journalism and distributed discovery, which has enabled programmers and engineers to educate lawyers on technology relevant to legal cases of significance to the Free and Open Source community, and which, in turn, has taught technologists about the workings of the legal system; and
Hari Krishna Prasad Vemuru, a security researcher in India, who revealed security flaws in India’s paperless electronic voting machines, and endured jail time and political harassment to protect an anonymous source who enabled him to conduct the first independent security review of India’s e-voting system.
Franklin Institute Laureate
John R. Anderson, R.K. Mellon University Professor of Psychology and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, was named a 2011 Laureate by the Franklin Institute and awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science “for the development of the first large-scale computational theory of the process by which humans perceive, learn, and reason, and its application to computer tutoring systems.”
Prince Philip Designers Prize
Bill Moggridge, director of the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, was awarded the 2010 Prince Philip Designers Prize, an annual award by the Duke of Edinburgh that recognizes a lifetime contribution to design, for his contributions to the GRiD Compass laptop. Released in 1982, the GRiD Compass is widely credited as being the forerunner of today’s modern laptop.
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