The Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award is granted yearly by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to honor "specific theoretical accomplishments that have had a significant and demonstrable effect on the practice of computing". It was instituted in 1996, in memory of Paris C. Kanellakis, a computer scientist who died with his immediate family in an airplane crash in South America in 1995 (American Airlines Flight 965). The award is accompanied by a prize of $10,000 and is endowed by contributions from Kanellakis's parents, with additional financial support provided by four ACM Special Interest Groups (SIGACT, SIGDA, SIGMOD, and SIGPLAN), the ACM SIG Projects Fund, and individual contributions.
| Year | Winners | Citation | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1996 | Leonard Adleman, Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman, Ralph Merkle, Ronald Rivest, and Adi Shamir | For "the conception and first effective realization of public-key cryptography". | |
| 1997 | Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv | For their pioneering work in data compression, leading to their LZ algorithm which "yields the best compression rate achievable by finite-state encoders" and "can be found in virtually every modern computer". | |
| 1998 | Randal Bryant, Edmund M. Clarke, E. Allen Emerson, and Kenneth L. McMillan | For "their invention of 'symbolic model checking', a method of formally checking system designs widely used in the computer hardware industry". | |
| 1999 | Daniel Sleator and Robert Tarjan | For "invention of the widely used splay-tree data structure". | |
| 2000 | Narendra Karmarkar | For "his theoretical work in devising an interior point method for linear programming that provably runs in polynomial time, and for his implementation work suggesting that Interior Point methods could be effective for linear programming in practice as well as theory". | |
| 2001 | Eugene Myers | For "his contribution to sequencing the human genome, the complete DNA content of a human cell, and encoding all of its genes, the basic building blocks of life". | |
| 2002 | Peter Franaszek | For "his seminal and sustained contributions to the theory and application of constrained channel coding". | |
| 2003 | Gary Miller, Michael Rabin, Robert Solovay, and Volker Strassen | For "their contributions to realizing the practical uses of cryptography and for demonstrating the power of algorithms that make random choices", through work which "led to two probabilistic primality tests, known as the Solovay–Strassen test and the Miller–Rabin test". | |
| 2004 | Yoav Freund and Robert Schapire | For their "seminal work and distinguished contributions [...] to the development of the theory and practice of boosting, a general and provably effective method of producing arbitrarily accurate prediction rules by combining weak learning rules"; specifically, for AdaBoost, their machine learning algorithm, which "can be used to significantly reduce the error of algorithms used in statistical analysis, spam filtering, fraud detection, optical character recognition, and market segmentation, among other applications". | |
| 2005 | Gerard Holzmann, Robert Kurshan, Moshe Vardi, and Pierre Wolper | For "their contribution to techniques that provide powerful formal verification tools for hardware and software systems". | |
| 2006 | Robert Brayton | For "his innovative contributions to logic synthesis and electronic system simulation, which have made possible rapid circuit design technologies for the electronic design automation industry". | |
| 2007 | Bruno Buchberger | For "his role in developing the theory of Groebner bases, which has become a crucial building block to computer algebra, and is widely used in science, engineering, and computer science". | |
| 2008 | Corinna Cortes and Vladimir Vapnik | For "their revolutionary development of a highly effective algorithm known as support vector machines (SVM), a set of related supervised learning methods used for data classification and regression", which is "one of the most frequently used algorithms in machine learning, and is used in medical diagnosis, weather forecasting, and intrusion detection among many other practical applications". | |
| 2009 | Mihir Bellare and Phillip Rogaway | For "their development of practice-oriented provable security, which has resulted in high-quality, cost-effective cryptography, a key component for Internet security in an era of explosive growth in online transactions". | |
| 2010 | Kurt Mehlhorn | For "contributions to algorithm engineering that led to creation of the Library of Efficient Data types and Algorithms (LEDA)", a software collection of data structures and algorithms which "has been incorporated in the applied research programs of thousands of companies worldwide in telecommunications, bioinformatics, computer-aided design (CAD) and geographic information systems (GIS), banking, optical products, and transportation". | |
| 2011 | Hanan Samet | For "pioneering research on quadtrees and other multidimensional spatial data structures for sorting spatial information, as well as his well-received books, which have profoundly influenced the theory and application of these structures". | |
| 2012 | Andrei Broder, Moses S Charikar and Piotr Indyk | For "their groundbreaking work on locality-sensitive hashing that has had great impact in many fields of computer science including computer vision, databases, information retrieval, machine learning, and signal processing". | |
| 2013 | Robert D. Blumofe, and Charles E. Leiserson | For "contributions to efficient and robust parallel computation through both provably efficient randomized scheduling protocols and a set of parallel-language primitives constituting the Cilk framework". They developed provably efficient randomized work stealing scheduling algorithms, and Cilk, a small set of linguistic primitives for programming multithreaded computations. | |
| 2014 | James Demmel | For "contributions to algorithms and software for numerical linear algebra used in scientific computing and large-scale data analysis." | |
| 2015 | Michael Luby | For "groundbreaking contributions to erasure correcting codes, which are essential for improving the quality of video transmission over the Internet." | |
| 2016 | Amos Fiat and Moni Naor | For "the development of broadcast encryption and traitor tracing systems".[1] | |
| 2017 | Scott Shenker | For "pioneering contributions to fair queueing in packet-switching networks, which had a major impact on modern practice in computer communication."[2] | |
| 2018 | Pavel A. Pevzner | For "pioneering contributions to the theory, design, and implementation of algorithms for string reconstruction and to their applications in the assembly of genomes."[3] | |
| 2019 | Noga Alon, Phillip Gibbons, Yossi Matias and Mario Szegedy | For "seminal work on the foundations of streaming algorithms and their application to large-scale data analytics."[4] | |
| 2020 | Yossi Azar, Andrei Broder, Anna Karlin, Michael Mitzenmacher, and Eli Upfal | For "the discovery and analysis of balanced allocations, known as the power of two choices, and their extensive applications to practice." | |
| 2021 | Avrim Blum, Irit Dinur, Cynthia Dwork, Frank McSherry, Kobbi Nissim, and Adam D. Smith | For "fundamental contributions to the development of differential privacy."[5] | |
| 2022 | Michael Burrows, Paolo Ferragina, and Giovanni Manzini | For "inventing the BW-transform and the FM-index that opened and influenced the field of Compressed Data Structures with fundamental impact on data compression and computational biology."[6] | |
| 2023 | Guy Blelloch, Julian Shun, and Laxman Dhulipala | For "contributions to algorithm engineering, including the Ligra, GBBS, and Aspen frameworks which revolutionized large-scale graph processing on shared-memory machines."[7] |