2011 IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award

The IEEE Emanual R. Piore Award is presented annually to an individual, or team of two individuals for outstanding contributions in the field of information processing, in relation to computer science.

The Emanual R. Priore Award was established by the IEEE Board of Directors in 1976 and is sponsored by the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award Fund. Recipient selection is administered by the Technical Field Awards Council of the IEEE Awards Board. In the evaluation process, the following criteria are considered: contribution, significance, advancement, fundamental innovation, societal value, and the quality of the nomination. The award consists of a bronze medal, certificate and honorarium.

The 2011 Emmanual R. Piore Award winner is SHAFI GOLDWASSER for pioneering work in laying the foundations of modern cryptography and its relation to complexity theory.

Shafi Goldwasser. Shafi Goldwasser is one of the key figures responsible for the success of modern cryptography in providing secure electronic data transmission and exchange. In 1983, her work on probabilistic encryption with Silvio Micali demonstrated how to use randomness to define and achieve semantic security. She produced one of the most celebrated results in modern cryptography in 1985 with her work on zero-knowledge proofs with Silvio Micali and Charles Rackoff. This special type of interactive proof allows one to prove possession of information or property without revealing the information itself. In the area of complexity theory, Dr. Goldwasser and co-authors showed a new method to classify the complexity of even approximating the solution of NP-complete problems. Dr. Goldwasser with Oded Goldreich and Dana Ron initiated the field of property testing of combinatorial objects such as graphs. An IEEE Member, Dr. Goldwasser is the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA and Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel.

Award Presentation

The award presentation will take place on October 23, 2011 at the 2011 IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2011) in Palm Springs, CA, followed by an award lecture by Dr. Goldwasser.

Past Piore Award Recipients

  • 1977: George Stibitz
  • 1978: J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly
  • 1979: Richard Hamming
  • 1980: Lawrence Rabiner and Ronald W. Schafer
  • 1981: No Award
  • 1982: Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie
  • 1983: Niklaus Wirth
  • 1984: Harvey G. Cragon
  • 1985: Azriel Rosenfeld
  • 1986: David C. Evans and Ivan Sutherland
  • 1987: David Kuck
  • 1988: Grace Hopper
  • 1989: Peter A. Franaszek
  • 1990: Allen Newell
  • 1991: Joseph F. Traub
  • 1992: Harold S. Stone
  • 1993: Makoto Nagao
     
  • 1994: John L. Hennessy
  • 1995: Yale N. Patt
  • 1996: Edward J. McCluskey
  • 1997: Shun'ichi Amari
  • 1998: Janak H. Patel
  • 1999: Narendra Ahuja
  • 2000: William Kahan
  • 2001: Ravishanker K. Iyer
  • 2002: Brian Randell
  • 2003: Giovanni De Micheli
  • 2004: Leslie Lamport
  • 2005: Jacob A. Abraham
  • 2006: Robert K. Brayton
  • 2007: Randal Bryant
  • 2008: Richard Rashid
  • 2009: David J. DeWitt
  • 2010: Nancy A. Lynch

    • 2011 Emmanuel R. Piore Award Committee

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