The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the oldest and largest society for computing and technology professionals worldwide, has recognized two Georgia Tech professors for their contributions to both the practical and theoretical aspects of computing and information technology.

Krishna V. Palem, joint professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the College of Computing and the founding Director of the Center for Research in Embedded Systems & Technology (CREST) (1999-2005), was named an ACM Fellow for contributions to compiler optimization and embedded computing. He has worked with and led efforts internationally in the area of embedded systems and their compiler optimizations, having founded one of the earliest laboratories for research in academia dedicated to this field in 1994 "the Real-time Compilation Technologies and Instruction Level Parallelism (ReaCTILP) laboratory at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, where he was a faculty member. The work pursued there led to the widely used TRIMARAN system co-developed with the CAR group of HP-Labs and the IMPACT project of the University of Illinois. From 1986 to 1994, he was a member of the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. As part of his research and while at Georgia Tech, Palem laid the foundations of architecture assembly which the prestigious Analysts' Choice Awards recognized by nominating it as one of the outstanding technologies of 2002. More recently, he has been innovating a novel technology entitled Probabilistic CMOS (PCMOS) for enabling ultra low-energy embedded computing. He was a Schonbrunn visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, where he was recognized for excellence in teaching, and an invited professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. Palem was instrumental in helping found the first thematic program in Embedded and Hybrid Systems administered by Singapore's premier funding agency, ASTAR, and chairs its advisory body in this area. He is a fellow of the IEEE.

Vijay Vazirani, professor in the College of Computing, was named an ACM Fellow for contributions to optimization and approximation algorithms. Dr. Vazirani is a leading researcher in algorithm design, and more generally, in the theory of computing. Throughout his research career, he has demonstrated a consistent ability to obtain novel algorithmic ideas, frequently of substantial mathematical depth, which while solving the problem at hand, also lay the groundwork for future contributions by others. Vazirani joined Georgia Tech in 1995. His work on approximation algorithms, championing the primal-dual schema, which he applied to network design, facility location, and web searching and clustering, helped determine the direction of that field in the 1990's, culminating in his definitive book on the subject, published in 2001 and translated into several languages. More recently, with his brother, Umesh Vazirani, professor at U.C. Berkeley, and his doctoral students, Aranyak Mehta and Amin Saberi, he has gone back to his earlier seminal contributions to the classical maximum matching problem to develop algorithms for optimizing ad auctions on the web, an entirely new application with large commercial implications for search engine companies such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. His recent work in the nascent area of algorithmic game theory and market equilibria, which attempts to address economic/computational issues arising from the Internet, represents another example of the creation of a wholly new area. He is currently involved in producing, together with three other prominent researchers, an edited volume that will consolidate progress made in this area over the last five years and also help set the tone of research for the next few years.

The new ACM Fellows, from some of the world's leading industries, research labs and universities, have made significant advances that are having lasting effects on the lives of citizens throughout the world. This year ACM selected 34 of its members as ACM Fellows.

Several universities had multiple winners, including Georgia Tech, Berkeley, Brown, Carnegie Mellon, Illinois, Stanford, Washington and Wisconsin, with achievements in a variety of fields. Among the technology areas cited were: verifiable voting systems; software reliability and security; active and semi-structured database systems; high performance discrete-event simulation; theory and computing infrastructure for real time computing systems; shared-memory multiprocessing; compiler construction, programming languages, interactive programming environments, and network architecture, protocols and algorithms.

Within the corporate sector, Intel Corporation garnered two Fellows, with achievements recognized in mobile and ubiquitous systems, and high performance processors and multimedia architectures. AT&T Labs also had two Fellows, whose contributions were in algorithms and data structures, and the theory of e-commerce and market-based, decentralized computation. Other corporate research facilities with 2005 Fellows were Microsoft Research; IBM Almaden Research Center; and Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies. Their contributions included database query processing; application of logic in computer science; and packet processing and traffic management algorithms.

"These individuals deserve our acclaim for their dedication, creativity, and success in pursuing productive careers in information technology," said ACM President David Patterson. "By seizing these opportunities, they demonstrate the astonishing potential for innovation in the computing discipline, and the broad-based, profound and enduring impacts of their achievements for the way we live and work in the 21st Century. On a personal note, I am pleased that I've known and collaborated with many of these new fellows for several years."

ACM will formally recognize the new Fellows at its annual Awards Banquet on May 20, 2006, in San Francisco, CA. Additional information about the ACM 2005 Fellows, the awards event, as well as previous ACM Fellows and award winners is available at www.acm.org/awards.

2005 ACM Fellows
Thomas E. Anderson, University of Washington
Dines Bjǿrner, Technical University of Denmark
Stephen R. Bourne, El Dorado Ventures
Rodney Brooks, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Surajit Chaudhuri, Microsoft Research
Keith D. Cooper, Rice University
David L. Dill, Stanford University
Christophe Diot, Thomson Paris Research Lab
Michel Dubois, University of Southern California
Michael J. Franklin, University of California, Berkeley
Ophir Frieder, Illinois Institute of Technology
Robert Harper, Carnegie Mellon University
Maurice Herlihy, Brown University
Phokion G. Kolaitis, IBM Almaden Research Center
Vipin Kumar, University of Minnesota
T.V. Lakshman, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies
Brad A. Myers, Carnegie Mellon University
David M. Nicol, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Krishna Palem, Georgia Institute of Technology
Thomas Reps, University of Wisconsin, Madison/GrammaTech, Inc.
Lui Sha, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Mikkel Thorup, AT&T Labs - Research
Eli Upfal, Brown University
Umesh Vazirani, University of California, Berkeley
Vijay V. Vazirani, Georgia Institute of Technology
Roy Want, Intel Corporation
Gerhard Weikum, Max-Planck Institute for Informatics
Uri C. Weiser, Intel Corporation
Daniel S. Weld, University of Washington
Michael P. Wellman, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Jennifer Widom, Stanford University
Walter Willinger, AT&T Labs - Research
David A. Wood, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Hui Zhang, Carnegie Mellon University

About ACM
ACM is an educational and scientific society uniting the world's computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field's challenges. ACM strengthens the profession's collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.

About the ACM Fellows Program
Initiated in 1993, the Fellows program celebrates the exceptional contributions of the leading members in the computing field. These individuals have helped to enlighten researchers, developers, practitioners and end-users of information technology throughout the world. The new ACM Fellows join a distinguished list of colleagues to whom ACM and its members look for guidance and leadership in computing and information technology.