Tuesday, April 1, 2014

ACM and the Infosys Foundation have named David Blei the recipient of the 2013 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences. He initiated an approach to analyzing large collections of data using innovative statistical methods, known as "topic modeling," that make it possible to organize and summarize digital archives at a scale that would be impossible by human annotation. His work is scalable to collections of billions of documents. It has inspired new research programs across multiple disciplines, with applications for email archives, natural language processing, information retrieval, computational biology, social networks, and robotics as well as computational social sciences and digital humanities.

The ACM-Infosys Foundation Award recognizes the finest recent innovations by young scientists and system developers in the computing field. An endowment from the Infosys Foundation provides financial support for the $175,000 annual award.

ACM will present the 2013 A.M. Turing Award at its annual Awards Banquet on June 21 in San Francisco, California.