Berger, Shenoy and Sitaraman Named 2019 ACM Fellows
Three recognized for accomplishments and contributions to computing and IT
Professors Emery Berger, Prashant Shenoy and Ramesh Sitaraman of the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) have been named Fellows by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society.
The ACM Fellow recognition is the organization’s highest member grade, representing less than one percent of ACM members, who have been named for their “foundational accomplishments in computing and information technology.” The three are part of a group of 58 new ACM fellows representing 44 universities, companies and research centers from around the world. ACM will formally recognize them at its annual awards banquet in San Francisco in June.
Laura Haas, dean of CICS, says, “We are beyond proud of our faculty for their exemplary work, effort and contributions. This year’s three honorees, the most of any academic institution, join 13 CICS faculty who have received this honor in years past. Their groundbreaking research represents the best of our college's work.”
Berger, who is co-director of the Programming Languages and Systems at Massachusetts (PLASMA) research lab at CICS, is cited for his “contributions in memory management and programming language implementation.” He is best known for his work on the Hoard memory manager, the first truly scalable memory allocator, he explains. Its algorithm serves as the basis for the Mac OS X memory manager, as well as the DieHard and DieHarder memory managers, which directly inspired the managers incorporated in Microsoft Windows.
Shenoy, an associate dean of CICS and director of the Center for Smart and Connected Society and the Laboratory for Advanced Systems Software, is recognized for his “contributions to modeling and design of distributed systems.” He is known for his work on automatic scaling of web services under heavy loads, as well as work to decarbonize distributed systems and physical infrastructure through computational approaches.
Sitaraman, director of the Laboratory for Internet-Scale Distributed Systems and a member of the Theoretical Computer Science group, is recognized for his “contributions to content delivery networks, distributed systems, and scalable internet services.” He is best known for his role in pioneering content delivery networks that currently deliver much of the world’s web content, streaming videos, applications and online services to billions of people around the globe.