March 2011: National Inventors Hall of Fame: Living inductees in the IT field included public key cryptography pioneers Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle; Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver, for their work on the optically scanned barcode. Historical inductees included Alexander Graham Bell cohort Thomas Watson, for improvements to the telephone. More info.
March 2011: A.M. Turing Award. Leslie Valiant, a versatile computer scientist at Harvard University whose work has impacted everything from artificial intelligence to distributed computing, has been named the winner of the 2010 A.M. Turing Award (the 2010 award is announced in 2011).
The annual Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) award, sometimes called the "Nobel Prize in Computing," recognizes Valiant for his broad contributions to computational learning theory and computer science. The award comes with a $250,000 prize funded by Google and Intel.
March 2011: Computer History Museum Fellow Awards. 2011 Hall of Fellows inductees are Bill Joy for his work on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix system and the co-founding of Sun; and the Team of Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle for their work on public key cryptography. This award recognizes each Fellow's role in the advancement of computing history, as well as the impact of their contributions. More info.
May 2011: World Telecommunication and Information Society Award. The 2011 award was presented in Geneva to: President Tarja Halonen of Finland; telecommunication innovator Sam Pitroda, who is currently adviser to the Prime Minister of India on Public Information Infrastructure and Innovations; and CEO and co-founder of Inveneo Kristin Peterson. This honor - a trophy and citation -- has been bestowed annually since 2006 to "eminent personalities who have contributed to connecting rural communities to the benefits of ICTs." More info.
