Leslie Valiant wins Turing Award
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) today (March 9) named Leslie G. Valiant the winner of the 2010 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his fundamental contributions to the development of computational learning theory and to the broader theory of computer science. Valiant, the T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), brought together machine learning and computational complexity, leading to advances in artificial intelligence as well as computing practices such as natural language processing, handwriting recognition, and computer vision. He also launched several subfields of theoretical computer science, and developed models for parallel computing. The Turing Award, widely considered the “Nobel Prize in Computing,” is named for the British mathematician Alan M. Turing. The award carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corp. and Google Inc. “Leslie Valiant’s accomplishments over the last 30 years have provided the theoretical...