Two Georgia Tech College of Computing senior faculty members have been named the newest Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellows.

ACM announced this week that Regents’ Professor Richard Fujimoto and Professor Wenke Lee have earned the distinction that annually recognizes the top 1 percent of ACM members for their achievements in computing and service to the ACM and computing community. ACM has almost 100,000 members who are selected by a committee every year.

“Becoming an ACM Fellow is a distinct honor, personally for me, in recognition of some 30 years work in the parallel and distributed simulation field,” said Fujimoto, a faculty member in the the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE).

“More importantly, it provides evidence of recognition of modeling and simulation as an important interdisciplinary area within the computing discipline. I am hopeful that more folks in the modeling and simulation community will be named as ACM fellows in the years ahead.”

Fujimoto was the founding chair of CSE and served in this role from 2005 to 2014. During this period, he led the creation of several CSE education programs, including the CSE M.S. and Ph. D. programs, the Modeling and Simulation Thread of the College’s undergraduate program, and two undergraduate minor programs, among others. The online option of the CSE M.S. program was the College’s first online degree.

“That it recognizes modeling and simulation as a core area of research and education is certainly good news for CSE. I expect many more CSE faculty will be so-honored in the years ahead,” he said.

Fujimoto’s research concerns the execution of discrete-event simulation programs on parallel and distributed computing platforms. This research includes work on platforms ranging from mobile distributed computing research systems to supercomputers.

After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1983, he has contributed research to the parallel and distributed simulation field since. His work spans several application areas including transportation systems, telecommunication networks, and multiprocessor and defense systems. He also led the working group that was responsible for defining the time management services of the High Level Architecture (IEEE Standard 1516).

“Coincidentally, the award announcement comes literally days after many of the original researchers in the parallel and distributed simulation field convened at the Winter Simulation Conference in Las Vegas to present a paper titled Parallel Discrete Event Simulation: The Making of a Field,” said Fujimoto.

The paper recounts key developments in the field and its impacts. It shows much of the history of the development of the field that would otherwise never have been captured.

“Richard is one of the leading minds in the computational modeling and simulation community, and he is a true asset to Georgia Tech and the School of CSE community. This recognition as an ACM Fellow is well deserved and a testament to his contributions to the field over the past three decades,” said CSE Chair David Bader.

“I am humbled and deeply appreciative because it is such an honor to be named an ACM Fellow,” Lee said, a professor in the School of Computer Science (SCS) and co-director of the Institute for Information Security & Privacy.

“Wenke Lee's recognition by the ACM cements his and Georgia Tech's reputation as one of the true leaders in cybersecurity research in the country,” SCS Chair Lance Fortnow said.

Lee is being recognized for his achievements in cybersecurity. He is a world-renowned expert on systems and network security, applied cryptography, and machine learning. Recently, he has focused on the security of mobile systems and apps, botnet detection and malware analysis, adversarial machine learning, and detection and mitigation of information manipulation on the internet.

Since joining the SCS faculty in 2001, Lee has published dozens of influential papers at top cybersecurity conferences such as USENIX Security Symposium, ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, the Network & Distributed System Security Symposium, and IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy. He also regularly works on projects with the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Office of Naval Research, and private industry.

Although Lee has had considerable impact in cybersecurity, the field was only just beginning when he earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University 20 years ago. “Everything was ripe for discovery, there were endless problems to anticipate and solve, and I knew I could take my career in a number of directions,” he said.

“Since then, I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to improve user security and privacy for the very technologies – popular programs, browsers, apps and iPhones – that have become central to our daily lives.”

“It is personally important to me that every individual have the right to keep their data safe, guard proprietary knowledge, and retain the freedom to choose when and how they share it. I look forward to continuing this work and to guiding others to develop more cybersecurity solutions,” Lee said.

Along with Fujimoto and Lee, former Associate Professor Gabe Loh and SCS alumnus Anand Sivasubramaniam were also named ACM Fellows this year.