UNSW academic joins prestigious computer science fellowship
Professor Toby Walsh at UNSW Engineering, one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) academics, has been elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for his contributions to the field. He is a Scientia Professor at UNSW School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), an Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate Fellow and leads the Algorithmic Decision Theory group at Data61 at CSIRO.
“I am very honoured to be elected a Fellow of the ACM, the premier scientific society for computing,” Professor Walsh said. “I have been lucky over the years to work with many fantastic colleagues and students at UNSW, and wish to thank them for their many contributions to my research.”
The ACM Fellows program recognises the top 1 per cent of ACM members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community. Fellows are nominated by their peers, with nominations reviewed by a distinguished selection committee.
“This year our task in selecting the 2020 Fellows was a little more challenging, as we had a record number of nominations from around the world,” said ACM President Gabriele Kotsis.
“The 2020 ACM Fellows have demonstrated excellence across many disciplines of computing. These men and women have made pivotal contributions to technologies that are transforming whole industries, as well as our personal lives. We fully expect that these new ACM Fellows will continue in the vanguard in their respective fields.”
ACM has named 95 Fellows for wide-ranging and fundamental contributions in areas including artificial intelligence, cloud computing, computer graphics, computational biology, data science, human-computer interaction, software engineering, theoretical computer science, and virtual reality, among other areas. Their accomplishments have driven innovations that ushered in significant improvements across many areas of technology, industry and personal life.
The 2020 Fellows represent universities, corporations and research centres in Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Germany, Israel, Japan, The Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Last year, Professor Walsh was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for intellectual leadership and significant contributions to automated deduction, constraint programming and fairness in AI.