Three Faculty Members Elected ACM Fellows

Three faculty members in the University of Maryland’s Department of Computer Science were named Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). They are among the cohort of 57 members named 2022 ACM Fellows, which recognizes the top 1% of ACM members for their “outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community.”

“ACM fellowships are among the most prestigious recognitions awarded only to a very select group of outstanding researchers and leaders in the computing community,” said Department Chair Matthias Zwicker, who holds the Elizabeth Iribe Chair for Innovation and the Phillip H. and Catherine C. Horvitz Professorship in Computer Science. “We are incredibly proud of the achievements of our colleagues throughout their distinguished careers and deeply grateful for their lasting contributions to our department.”

Nominated by peers and evaluated by a selection committee, ACM Fellows have achieved a lasting impact on the field of computing through technical leadership and the demonstration of innovation, originality, and creativity in theoretical or practical accomplishments.

“Computing’s most important advances are often the result of a collection of many individual contributions, which build upon and complement each other,” explained ACM President Yannis Ioannidis in the announcement. “But each individual contribution is an essential link in the chain. The ACM Fellows program is a way to recognize the women and men whose hard work and creativity happens inconspicuously but drives our field. In selecting a new class of ACM Fellows each year, we also hope that learning about these leaders might inspire our wider membership with insights for their own work.”

Michael Hicks

Michael Hicks, a professor emeritus of computer science with a joint appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, was recognized for “contributions to programming language design and implementation, program analysis, and software security.”

He has conducted influential research for 25 years, applying novel programming languages and program analysis techniques to solve a variety of problems in security, systems, databases, networks and quantum computing. Hicks has developed programming languages and tools to secure low-level programs, update software dynamically, ensure data confidentiality and integrity, and implement formally verified programming stacks on emerging quantum computers. During his career, he has published more than 140 refereed conference and journal papers that have been cited more than 11,500 times. 

In 2022, Hicks received the ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) Distinguished Service Award. He was elected and served as SIGPLAN chair (2015-18) and then as past chair for three years. As past chair, he founded and was the editor-in-chief of the SIGPLAN blog called PL Perspectives. Hicks was also the Principles of Programming Languages symposium steering committee chair (2018-21) and Computer Security Foundations Symposium programming co-chair (2015-16).

He previously served as associate editor of ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, co-founded the IEEE Secure Development Conference, co-founded the International Workshop on Programming Languages for Quantum Computing (PlanQC), was a founding member of the SIGPLAN Climate Committee and served on the SIGPLAN Empirical Evaluation Committee. Hicks is currently area chair for the SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation and editor-in-chief of the Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages.

Hicks also contributes to community outreach activities, including the Build It, Break It, Fix It security contest he developed and ran for several years at UMD.

Hicks received his B.S. in computer science from Pennsylvania State University in 1993 and his M.S. and Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1996 and 2001, respectively. He then spent one year as a postdoctoral associate affiliated with the Information Assurance Institute of the Computer Science Department at Cornell University. He is currently a senior principal scientist at Amazon Web Services.

Samir Khuller

Samir Khuller, a professor emeritus of computer science, was recognized “for contributions to algorithm design with real-world implications and for mentoring and community-building.” 

Khuller's research interests include graph algorithms, discrete optimization, scheduling, and computational geometry. He has published nearly 200 journal and conference papers, and several book chapters on these topics. Khuller is a co-principal investigator of the Institute for Data, Econometrics, Algorithms, and Learning (IDEAL), which received a five-year, $10 million National Science Foundation (NSF) Harnessing the Data Revolution: Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science Phase II award last year.

In 2016, Khuller earned the inaugural European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA) Test-of-Time Award for his work with collaborator Sudipto Guha on approximation algorithms for connected dominating sets and in 2021 he was named Fellow of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science. He also received the 2020 CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award. From 2018 to 2021, Khuller served as chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT). He has served on many program committees and on the ESA Steering Committee; he also chaired the 2019 Workshop on Models and Algorithms for Planning and Scheduling. 

Khuller is an associate editor of Networks and an editorial board member of Algorithmica. He previously served as editor of the International Journal on Foundations of Computer Science and editor of the ACM Transactions on Algorithms “Problems Column.”

Khuller received his M.S. and Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1989 and 1990, respectively. He spent two years as a research associate at UMD before joining the Department of Computer Science in 1992, where he was a professor for 27 years. Khuller is currently the Peter and Adrienne Barris Chair of Computer Science at Northwestern University. 

David Mount

David Mount, a professor of computer science with a joint appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, was recognized for “contributions to algorithms and data structures for geometric data analysis and retrieval.”

He has published almost 200 research papers on algorithms for geometric problems, particularly problems with applications in image processing, pattern recognition, information retrieval and computer graphics. 

He currently serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including TheoretiCS, Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications, and the International Journal of Computational Geometry & Applications. Mount previously served on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems, ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, and Pattern Recognition. He was co-recipient of the Symposium on Computational Geometry Test-of-Time Award in 2021 for the paper titled “The analysis of a simple k-means clustering algorithm.”

Mount was the conference chair for the International Symposium on Computational Geometry in 2008. He has served on the program committees of many of the major conferences in his area, including as the program committee co-chair for the ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry in 2003 and the Fourth Workshop on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments in 2002 and SPIE's Conferences on Vision Geometry from 2001 through 2006. He co-authored the textbook Data Structures and Algorithms in C++ with Mike Goodrich and Roberto Tamassia.

He received his B.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from Purdue University in 1977 and 1983, respectively, and started at UMD in 1984. 

This article includes contributions from Northwestern University.