May 21, 2020

Gibbons Will Receive ACM's Kanellakis Award

CMU professor recognized for seminal work on streaming algorithms

The Association for Computing Machinery has announced that Carnegie Mellon University's Phillip Gibbons, professor in the Computer Science department and the Electrical and Computer Engineering department, will receive the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award.

Gibbons will share the award with Noga Alon of Princeton University and Tel Aviv University, Yossi Matias of Google and Tel Aviv University and Mario Szegedy of Rutgers University. The award recognizes them for their seminal work on the foundations of streaming algorithms and their application to large-scale analytics.

In a series of papers published in the late 1990s, Gibbons and his colleagues pioneered a framework for algorithmic treatment of streaming massive datasets, the ACM said. Their algorithms remain the core approach for streaming big data and constitute an entire subarea of the field of algorithms. The concepts they introduced are routinely used in a variety of data analysis tasks in databases, network monitoring, usage analytics in internet products, natural language processing and machine learning.

Gibbons joined the CMU faculty in 2015. He previously had been principal research scientist at Intel Labs Pittsburgh and was the principal investigator for the Intel Science and Technology Center for Cloud Computing. He was a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories from 1990 to 2001.

The Kanellakis Award honors specific theoretical accomplishments that have had a significant and demonstrable effect on the practice of computing. Previous CMU recipients include faculty members Edmund M. Clarke, Randy Bryant, Daniel Sleator and Gary L. Miller and SCS alumnus Kenneth McMillan.