Frans Kaashoek wins the 2010 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award
Posted on March 30, 2011
by Tommy McGuire
According to ACM TechNews and the MIT news, Frans Kaashoek has won the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2010 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences. Prof. Kaashoek has done a lot of interesting distributed systems work and certainly deserves assorted awards. However, the weird part and what prompts this post is the specific award. According to SD Times and the ACM itself, [the] ACM-Infosys Foundation Award, established in August 2007, recognizes personal contributions by young scientists and system developers to a contemporary innovation that exemplifies the greatest recent achievements in the computing field. Financial support for the $150,000 award is provided by an endowment from the Infosys Foundation.
Specifically, notice the "young scientists and system developers" part. Kaashoek won the NSF national young investigator award in 1994 according to his page at MIT. He received his Ph.D. in 1992 under Andy Tannenbaum. Heck, the earliest publication listed by him was in 1991. That would seem to make him roughly my age; certainly, it doesn't seem like he would be eligible for a Fields Medal.
So, congratulations to Frans! And maybe there is some hope for my aging carcass. I mean, if he is a "young scientist"....