The A.M.Turing Award is often called the Nobel prize of computer science. Now, thanks to Google‘s largesse, it will be a Nobel-level prize financially: $1 million.
The quadrupling of the
prize money, announced on Thursday by the Association for Computing
Machinery, the professional organization that administers the award, is
intended to elevate the prominence and recognition of computer science.
The move can be seen as another sign of the boom times in technology.
Computing is
increasingly an ingredient in every field, from biology to business.
College students are rushing to take computer science courses,
encouraged by their parents. It’s not just a skill but a mind-set.
Computational thinking is the future, where the excitement and money is.
Quants rule.
But the Turing Award
celebrates the slower and deeper side of computing. It is given, said
Alexander L. Wolf, president of A.C.M. and a professor of computer
science at Imperial College London, to the “true pioneers” who are
“fundamental contributors to the science and technology of computing.”
Previous recipients
have not been household names, except in very geeky households. They did
not make fortunes, but they created the underlying insights in
mathematics, and in software and hardware design, that helped make
personal computers, the Internet, online commerce, social networks and
smartphones a reality.
Yet computer science
is also a practical, problem-solving discipline. At the announcement
event on Thursday morning in New York, Stuart Feldman, vice president of
engineering at Google, said he had been impressed by the blend of the
theoretical and practical sides of computing in reading over the Turing
Award citations since 1966. The prize, he said, recognizes both “the
finest of thought and the broadest of impact.”
The Turing Award had carried prize money of $250,000 and was jointly underwritten by Google and Intel
since 2007. But Intel decided to step away as a funder, and Google
stepped up and upped the ante. The million-dollar award essentially
matches the Nobel prize’s 8 million Swedish kronor, which is a bit more
than $1 million at current exchange rates.
Albert
Fert, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2007, left, with Joseph
Sifakis, winner of the Turing Award that year. Since then, the Turing
Award had carried prize money of $250,000, jointly underwritten by
Google and Intel.Credit Olivier Laban-Mattei/Pool Photo, via Reuters
Increasing the financial reward, Mr. Feldman said, lifts the Turing Award into the “major league of scientific prizes.”
For Google, being the
deep-pocketed benefactor of the Turing Award is both good branding and a
public statement that it takes fundamental research seriously.
“Computing is our
lifeblood,” Mr. Feldman said. The company, he added, hopes that
increasing the prize money will give greater public prominence and
recognition to the importance of computer science.
Silvio Micali, one of
the handful of Turing winners in attendance, spoke of the spread of
computer science into other disciplines. By now, Mr. Micali said,
computing is well-established in the sciences. But the importance of
computing and its reach, he said, is destined to accelerate further
across the economy and society.
Mr. Micali, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
who won the prize in 2013, urged young computer scientists to go deep
and take on big challenges instead of focusing on “lesser and easier
targets” with quicker payoffs.
The patient pursuit of
computing research can seem out of step at a time when even many
undergraduate computer science students drop out of school to join
start-ups. When asked about that, Mr. Wolf said both the creation and
the commercialization of technology are needed. “Some people invent the
foundations on which others can build,” he said, “and others — some of
them dropouts — are those that make these technologies massively
available to people and society.”
Google itself reflects that combination. Its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were both Ph.D. candidates in computer science at Stanford University when they created the concepts behind Google search technology.
The legacy of Alan
Turing is certainly getting a boost this month, and not just from more
money for his namesake award. Next comes the release (on Friday in
Britain, and later this month in the United States) of “The Imitation Game,”
a movie version of Turing’s life, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the
English polymath and Keira Knightley as Joan Clarke, a friend and fellow
code-breaker at Bletchley Park, where German World War II codes were
successfully deciphered.
There is also the reissue in paperback of “Alan Turing: The Enigma,”
a biography of the man known as the father of theoretical computer
science and artificial intelligence. The book, written by Andrew Hodges,
was originally published in 1983. The new version carries the
additional subtitle, “The Book That Inspired the Film, The Imitation
Game.”
Past Turing winners, though, will not be getting a felicitous bump. The enriched prizes will not be retroactive.
“I just asked,” Butler W. Lampson joked at the announcement event in New York. Mr. Lampson was a leader in the 1970s at Xerox PARC, where so much of underlying technology of personal computing, adopted by Apple and Microsoft, was built.
For that work, Mr.
Lampson won a Turing Award in 1992. Today, Mr. Lampson is a scientist in
Microsoft’s research labs and an adjunct professor at M.I.T. Envious of
the paychecks for future winners? “Oh, I’ll get by,” he replied,
smiling.
