The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), America’s first learned society of computing, has nearly a hundred thousand members. However, it only has about five-hundred “fellows.” Fellowship status is rewarded only to “outstanding ACM members for their achievements in computer science and information technology.” This year, those receiving fellowship include four Google employees — Richard Lyon, Muthu Muthukrishnan, Fernando Pereira, and Luiz Barroso.
A list of forty-one new fellows inducted in 2010 was released directly on the ACM website. While having four members of the Google staff on the list is impressive, it’s not entirely unexpected; four Googlers also gained fellowship last year.
This year, three members are being honored for their contribution to research (Lyon, Muthukrishnan, Pereira), while one is being honored for his contribution to engineering (Barroso).
Richard Lyon: This Googler is one of the primary contributors to Google’s Street View technologies, and is the team lead for a group researching and implementing new approaches to “machine hearing.” Lyon has also contributed some significant invention to the field, including the creation of the first optical mouse, numerous advances in color processing, and working on early single-chip Ethernet technology.
Muthu Muthukrishnan: Muthu is one of the primary figures behind advanced string matching in data stream algorithms (which has contributed to search engines directly as well as to stability and maintenance algorithms) and helped establish the automation of media ads on Google.
Fernando Pereira: This Google Research Director was lead on several major projects that expanded both the theoretical understanding and technology behind machine learning, and is largely responsible for Google translation tools. He has contributed to finite-state and CRF models.
Luiz Barroso: Luiz, the Google Engineer, has contributed extensively to multi-core computing, energy efficiency in data-center technology, and the cluster architecture of large-scale data centers.
Additionally, Christos Faloutsos, who is receiving fellowship for his contributions indexing, power laws, and data mining, is a visiting Google staff member.
