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Web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee wins computing's highest award
World Wide Web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee just chalked up another accolade, and it's one of his greatest yet. The Association for Computing Machinery has given him the 2016 Turing Award, frequently considered the Nobel Prize of the computing industry. He's receiving the award not just for inventing the basics of the web, but designing them in an elegant way. His concepts for links (URLs and URIs) were simple and easy to implement, while making HTML the heart of the web helped anyone publish info in a practical format.
2015's 'Nobel Prize of computing' honors encryption pioneers
Unless you've just finished an incredibly dedicated Rip Van Winkle cosplay session, you're probably well aware of how hot a topic encryption is at the moment. To that end, the winners of the 2015 A.M. Turing Award have been announced. Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman, authors of 1976's Diffie-Hellman Protocol, are the recipients of computing's $1 million "Nobel Prize of computing." Diffie is the former Chief Security Officer for Sun Microsystems, while Hellman is a professor emeritus of electrical engineering at NorCal's Ivy League school, Stanford.
Dennis Ritchie, pioneer of C programming language and Unix, reported dead at age 70
We're getting reports today that Dennis Ritchie, the man who created the C programming language and spearheaded the development of Unix, has died at the age of 70. The sad news was first reported by Rob Pike, a Google engineer and former colleague of Ritchie's, who confirmed via Google+ that the computer scientist passed away over the weekend, after a long battle with an unspecified illness. Ritchie's illustrious career began in 1967, when he joined Bell Labs just one year before receiving a PhD in physics from Harvard University. It didn't take long, however, for the Bronxville, NY native to have a major impact upon computer science. In 1969, he helped develop the Unix operating system alongside Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan and other Bell colleagues. At around the same time, he began laying the groundwork for what would become the C programming language -- a framework he and co-author Kernighan would later explain in their seminal 1978 book, The C Programming Language. Ritchie went on to earn several awards on the strength of these accomplishments, including the Turing Award in 1983, election to the National Academy of Engineering in 1988, and the National Medal of Technology in 1999. The precise circumstances surrounding his death are unclear at the moment, though news of his passing has already elicited an outpouring of tributes and remembrance for the man known to many as dmr (his e-mail address at Bell Labs). "He was a quiet and mostly private man," Pike wrote his brief post, "but he was also my friend, colleague, and collaborator, and the world has lost a truly great mind."
Computer learning and computational neuroscience icon Dr. Leslie Valiant wins Turing Award
We've seen recently that computers are more than capable of kicking humanoids to the curb when it comes to winning fame and fortune, but it's still we humans who dole out the prizes, and one very brainy humanoid just won the best prize in computer science. That person is Leslie Valiant, and the prize is the fabled A.M. Turing Award. Dr. Valiant currently teaches at Harvard and over the years developed numerous algorithms and models for parsing and computer learning, including work to understand computational neuroscience. His achievements have helped make those machines smarter and better at thinking like we humans, but he's as of yet been unsuccessful in teaching them the most important thing: how to love.
Computing pioneer Chuck Thacker wins Turing Award
Chuck Thacker may not be quite the same household name as some other computing pioneers, but it's pretty hard to overstate the influence he's had on the industry, a feat for which he's now be honored with the A.M. Turing Award -- widely considered to be the "Nobel prize of computing." While Thacker is now a "Technical Fellow" at Microsoft, he first made a name for himself at Xerox PARC, where he not only helped design and realize the very first modern computer, the Alto, but co-invented Ethernet, and contributed to a range of other projects that have had a lasting impact on computing to this day. Later, while at Microsoft Reseach, Thacker oversaw the design of the very first Tablet PC prototypes, and he continues to lead up a computer-architecture group at the company and be involved with various research efforts. Of course, that's only scratching the surface -- hit up the links below for a more complete background of the man's work, and head on past the break for a short video put together for the occasion by Microsoft.
