The ACM Software System Award is an annual award that honors people or an organization "for developing a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both". It is awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) since 1983, with a cash prize sponsored by IBM of currently $35,000.
The following is a list of recipients of the ACM Software System Award:
Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) design. At Xerox PARC he led the design and development of the first modern windowed computer desktop interface. There he also led the development of the influential object-oriented programming language Smalltalk, both personally designing most of the early versions of the language and coining the term "object-oriented." He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Arts. He received the Turing award in 2003.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membership group, reporting nearly 110,000 student and professional members as of 2022. Its headquarters are in New York City.
Niklaus Emil Wirth is a Swiss computer scientist. He has designed several programming languages, including Pascal, and pioneered several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984, he won the Turing Award, generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science, for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages.
Software engineering is an engineering-based approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the engineering design process to design, develop, test, maintain, and evaluate computer software. The term programmer is sometimes used as a synonym, but may emphasize software implementation over design and can also lack connotations of engineering education or skills.
The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science and is colloquially known as or often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing".
David Lorge Parnas is a Canadian early pioneer of software engineering, who developed the concept of information hiding in modular programming, which is an important element of object-oriented programming today. He is also noted for his advocacy of precise documentation.
Stuart Feldman is an American computer scientist. He is best known as the creator of the computer software program make. He was also an author of the first Fortran 77 compiler, was part of the original group at Bell Labs that created the Unix operating system, and participated in development of the ALTRAN and EFL programming languages.
The Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award is granted yearly by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to honor "specific theoretical accomplishments that have had a significant and demonstrable effect on the practice of computing". It was instituted in 1996, in memory of Paris C. Kanellakis, a computer scientist who died with his immediate family in an airplane crash in South America in 1995. The award is accompanied by a prize of $10,000 and is endowed by contributions from Kanellakis's parents, with additional financial support provided by four ACM Special Interest Groups, the ACM SIG Projects Fund, and individual contributions.
David Harel is a computer scientist, currently serving as President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He has been on the faculty of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel since 1980, and holds the William Sussman Professorial Chair of Mathematics. Born in London, England, he was Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at the institute for seven years.
The Donald E. Knuth Prize is a prize for outstanding contributions to the foundations of computer science, named after the American computer scientist Donald E. Knuth.
A software system is a system of intercommunicating components based on software forming part of a computer system. It "consists of a number of separate programs, configuration files, which are used to set up these programs, system documentation, which describes the structure of the system, and user documentation, which explains how to use the system".
Elaine Jessica Weyuker is an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, and an AT&T Fellow at Bell Labs for research in software metrics and testing as well as elected to the National Academy of Engineering. She is the author of over 130 papers in journals and refereed conference proceedings.
Christopher Arthur Lattner is an American computer scientist, former Apple, Google, and Tesla employee and co-founder of LLVM, Clang compiler, MLIR compiler infrastructure and the Swift programming language. He worked as the President of Platform Engineering, SiFive after two years at Google Brain. Prior to that, he briefly served as Vice President of Autopilot Software at Tesla, Inc. and worked at Apple Inc. as Senior Director of the Developer Tools department, leading the Xcode, Instruments, and compiler teams.
John McKinley Chambers is the creator of the S programming language, and core member of the R programming language project. He was awarded the 1998 ACM Software System Award for developing S.
The Ken Kennedy Award, established in 2009 by the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society in memory of Ken Kennedy, is awarded annually and recognizes substantial contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and substantial community service or mentoring contributions. The award includes a $5,000 honorarium and the award recipient will be announced at the ACM - IEEE Supercomputing Conference.
Mary Lou Ehnot Soffa is an American computer scientist noted for her research on compilers, program optimization, system software and system engineering.
Mary Jean Harrold was an American computer scientist noted for her research on software engineering. She was also noted for her leadership in broadening participation in computing. She was on the boards of both CRA and CRA-W and was Co-Chair of CRA-W from 2003 to 2006.
Susan Beth Horwitz was an American computer scientist noted for her research on programming languages and software engineering, and in particular on program slicing and dataflow-analysis. She had several best paper and an impact paper award mentioned below under awards.
Jacob O. Wobbrock is a Professor in the University of Washington Information School and, by courtesy, in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. He is Director of the ACE Lab, Associate Director and founding Co-Director Emeritus of the CREATE research center, and a founding member of the DUB Group and the MHCI+D degree program.
Eugene Wong is a Chinese-American computer scientist and mathematician. Wong's career has spanned academia, university administration, government and the private sector. Together with Michael Stonebraker and a group of scientists at IBM, Wong is credited with pioneering database research in the 1970s from which software developed by IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle descends. Wong retired in 1994, since then holding the title of Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at University of California, Berkeley.