The ACM Prize in Computing was established by the Association for Computing Machinery to recognize individuals for early to mid-career innovative contributions to computing. It is generally recognized as one of the highest distinction in the field of computer science together with the Turing Award. While the Abel Prize in Mathematics is comparable to the Turing award, the Prize in Computing is similar to the Fields Medal in Mathematics in that it is the highest award in the field given to mid-career scientists. ACM Prize in Computing recipients are invited to participate in the Heidelberg Laureate Forum along with Turing Award recipients, Abel Prize winners, and Nobel Laureates. As of 2026, 20 people have been awarded the prize, with the most recent recipients being Matei Zaharia, who won in 2025.

The ACM Prize in Computing was previously known as the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences for award years 2007 through 2015. The award carries a prize of $250,000. Financial support is provided by an endowment from Infosys Inc. It is one of the two highest distinctions given by the Association for Computing Machinery.

The first recipient was Daphne Koller and the youngest recipients were Jon Kleinberg and Shwetak Patel who won in 2008 and 2019, respectively, at the age of 37. The oldest recipient was Sanjay Ghemawat, who won in 2012 at the age of 46. As of 2026, four women have been awarded the prize.

Recipients Year Recipients Citation2025Matei ZahariaFor his visionary development of distributed data systems and computing infrastructure, which has enabled large-scale machine learning, analytics, and AI at global scale2024Torsten HoeflerFor fundamental contributions to high-performance computing and the ongoing AI revolution2023Amanda RandlesFor ground-breaking contributions to computational health through innovative algorithms, tools, and high performance computing methods for diagnosing and treating a variety of human diseases2022Yael Tauman KalaiFor breakthroughs in verifiable delegation of computation and fundamental contributions to cryptography.2021Pieter AbbeelFor contributions to robot learning, including learning from demonstrations and deep reinforcement learning for robotic control.2020Scott AaronsonFor groundbreaking contributions to quantum computing.2019David SilverFor breakthrough advances in computer game-playing.2018Shwetak PatelFor contributions to creative and practical sensing systems for sustainability and health.2017Dina KatabiFor her groundbreaking work in human-sensing technologies using wireless signals and in reducing interference across wireless networks. 2016Alexei A. EfrosFor groundbreaking data-driven approaches to computer graphics and computer vision.2015Stefan SavageFor innovative research in network security, privacy, and reliability that has taught us to view attacks and attackers as elements of an integrated technological, societal, and economic system.2014Dan BonehFor ground-breaking contributions to the development of pairing-based cryptography and its application in identity-based encryption.2013David BleiFor contributions to the theory and practice of probabilistic topic modeling and Bayesian machine learning.2012Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay GhemawatFor their leadership in the science and engineering of Internet-scale distributed systems.2011Sanjeev AroraFor contributions to computational complexity, algorithms, and optimization that have helped reshape our understanding of computation.2010Frans KaashoekFor his landmark contributions to the structuring, robustness, scalability, and security of software systems, enabling efficient, mobile, and highly distributed applications and setting important research directions.2009Eric A. BrewerFor his design and development of highly scalable internet services and innovations in bringing information technology to developing regions.2008Jon KleinbergFor his contributions to the science of networks and the World Wide Web. His work is a deep combination of social insights and mathematical reasoning.2007Daphne KollerFor her work on combining relational logic and probability that allows probabilistic reasoning to be applied to a wide range of applications, including robotics, economics, and biology.

See also

List of computer science awards

References