ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory

# 2019 Knuth Prize Awarded to Avi Wigderson

The 2019 Knuth Prize is awarded to Avi Wigderson for fundamental and lasting contributions to the foundations of computer science in areas including randomized computation, cryptography, circuit complexity, proof complexity, parallel computation, and our understanding of fundamental graph properties.

# 2019 Gödel Prize Awarded to Irit Dinur

The 2019 Gödel Prize is awarded to Irit Dinur for her proof of the PCP Theorem in the paper The PCP theorem by gap amplification, Journal of the ACM, Vol 54 (3), Article 12, 2007 (preliminary version in the proceedings of the 38th Symposium on Theory of Computing, STOC 2006). See here for the full prize citation. Congratulations, Irit!

# Upcoming Deadlines: Gödel, Knuth, Distinguished Service Award Nominations

The deadlines to submit nominations for the Gödel Prize, Knuth Prize, and SIGACT Distinguished Service Award are coming soon. Calls for nominations for all three awards can be found at the following links.

• Gödel Prize: deadline February 15, 2019
• Knuth Prize: deadline February 15, 2019
• SIGACT Distinguished Service Award: deadline March 1, every year (including 2019)
Those who intend to submit a nomination for the Distinguished Service Award are strongly encouraged to inform the Selection Committee Chair at least two weeks in advance.

# SIGACT Research Highlights Committee

The goal of the SIGACT Research Highlights Committee is to help promote top computer science theory research via identifying results that are of high quality and broad appeal to the general computer science audience. These results would then be recommended for consideration for the Research Highlights section as well as other general–audience computer science research outlets.

Nomination and Selection Process

The committee solicits two types of nominations:

1. Conference nominations. Each year, the committee will ask the PC chairs of theoretical computer science conferences to send a selection of up to three top papers from these conferences (selected based on both their technical merit and breadth of interest to non-theory audience) and forwarding them to the committee for considerations.

2. Community nominations. The committee will accept nominations from the members of the community. Each such nomination should summarize the contribution of the nominated paper and also argue why this paper is suitable for broader outreach. The nomination should be no more than a page in length and can be submitted at any time by emailing it to sigact.cacm.nominations@gmail.com. Self-nominations are discouraged.

The Committee

The SIGACT Research Highlights Committee currently comprises the following members:

# Report on combating harassment and discrimination

The following message is from Sandi Irani, the chair of the ad hoc committee to combat harassment and discrimination in the Theory of Computing community.

A copy of the final report of the committee to address harassment in our community is now posted on the committee web page.

As always, feedback is welcome.