ACM recognizes Professors Ian Goldberg and Ken Salem as 2017 Distinguished Members

The Association for Computing Machinery has named David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science Professors Ian Goldberg and Ken Salem among 43 new ACM Distinguished Members globally for their outstanding scientific contributions to computing.

The 2017 Distinguished Members are responsible for an extraordinary array of achievements, reflecting many distinct areas of research and practice in the field of computing and information technology.

“Computing technology is becoming an increasingly dominant force in our daily lives and is transforming society at every level,” said ACM President Vicki L. Hanson. “In naming a new roster of Distinguished Members each year, ACM underscores that the innovations that improve our lives do not come about by accident, but rather are the result of the hard work, inspiration, and creativity of leading professionals in the field.”

Professor Goldberg, a founding member of the Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP) group, is being recognized for his contributions to the theory and practice of privacy-enhancing technologies.

Privacy-enhancing technologies promote freedom, autonomy, and human rights for Internet users around the world. Among Goldberg’s many successful projects is Off-the-Record Messaging, a cryptographic protocol that provides encryption for instant messaging conversations.

Professor Salem, a founding member of the Data Systems group, is being recognized for his contributions to the field of database management, which is concerned with organizing, storing, querying, and updating large amounts of information.

He is best known for his work on transactions, a key part of the conceptual underpinning of data-intensive systems. Transactions simplify development of database applications for everything from phones to enterprise data centres and the cloud.

“Congratulations to Ian and Ken on becoming ACM’s newest Distinguished Members,” said Mark Giesbrecht, Director of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. “They join a distinguished group of colleagues globally whose scientific achievements have been recognized by the ACM, the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society.”

The 2017 ACM Distinguished Members work at leading universities, corporations and research institutions around the world, including Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal, Qatar, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, and the United States.

Collectively, they make contributions in a wide range of areas including accessibility, computational geometry, cryptography, computer security, computer science education, data structures, healthcare technologies, human-computer interaction, nanoscale computing, robotics, and software engineering, among many others.