Awards Honor Lifetime Achievers as well as Outstanding Young Professionals: The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) today announced the winners of four prestigious awards honoring innovations in computing technology that impact the way we live and work. The awards reflect outstanding achievements that have resulted in faster design automation, more reliable software, improved information retrieval, and wider applications of artificial intelligence. The 2006 winners represent innovators from far-flung research and academic institutions who are applying computing skills to address some of the world's greatest challenges. These 2006 ACM awards honor extraordinary veteran innovators as well as rising stars in the computing arena. ACM will present these and other awards at the ACM Awards Banquet on June 9, 2007, in San Diego, CA. The 2006 ACM awards winners include:

• Robert K. Brayton - the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for his pioneering contributions to logic synthesis and electronic system simulation, which enabled rapid circuit design technologies for the electronic design automation industry. Brayton, a professor at University of California, Berkeley, contributed to design automation methods used in diverse applications in consumer, defense, and health care fields. The Kanellakis Award honors specific theoretical accomplishments that significantly affect the practice of computing.
• Eiffel - the Software System Award for this object-oriented programming language and environment, which helps developers create reliable, efficient software that is easy to change and reuse. Developed by Bertrand Meyer of ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) and Eiffel Software in California, Eiffel has become a standard to analyze, design, implement, and maintain demanding software systems. The Software System Award is given to an institution or individual(s) recognized for developing software systems that have had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts and/or commercial acceptance.
• Karen Spärck Jones - the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award for her contributions to research that enables communication with computers in everyday "natural" language. Spärck Jones is a professor of Computers and Information at Cambridge University, UK. Her work provided insights that are fundamental to many modern search engines, which use information retrieval tools to help find information stored on a computer system. The Newell Award recognizes career contributions that have breadth within computer science, or that bridge computer science and other disciplines.
• Daniel Klein - the Grace Murray Hopper Award for the design of the first machine learning system capable of inferring a high-quality grammar for English and other languages directly from text without human annotations or supervision. Klein is an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His system is an important step towards getting computers to understand natural languages, and producing machines that automate tasks involving human languages, a fundamental goal of artificial intelligence. His achievement in artificial intelligence complements the lifetime contributions of Karen Spärck Jones, the 2006 ACM Newell Award winner, whose work has focused on information retrieval. The Hopper Award recognizes the outstanding young computer professional of the year.

About the awards Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award honors specific theoretical accomplishments that have had a significant and demonstrable effect on the practice of computing. This award is accompanied by a prize of $5,000 and is endowed by contributions from the Kanellakis family, with additional financial support provided by ACM's Special Interest Groups on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT), Design Automation (SIGDA), Management of Data (SIGMOD), and Programming Languages (SIGPLAN), the ACM SIG Projects Fund, and individual contributions. Software System Award honors an institution or individual(s) recognized for developing a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both. This award carries a prize of $10,000. Financial support for the award is provided by IBM. ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award is presented to an individual selected for career contributions that have breadth within computer science, or that bridge computer science and other disciplines. This endowed award is accompanied by a prize of $10,000, and is supported by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and by individual contributions. Grace Murray Hopper Award is given to the outstanding young computer professional of the year, selected on the basis of a single recent major technical or service contribution. This award is accompanied by a prize of $15,000. The candidate must have been 35 years of age or less at the time the qualifying contribution was made. Financial support for this award is provided by Google.