2022 NAS member list announced: Turing Award winner and author of Dragon Book Alfred V. Aho elected

On May 3, local time, the National Academy of Sciences announced the list of a new batch of elected academicians for 2022.120 American scientists and 30 foreign scientistsSelected for outstanding contributions to original research. So far, the National Academy of Sciences has a total of 2,512 academicians and 517 foreign academicians.

In this list, Chinese scientists Cui Yi, Jin Yishi, Ma, Chung-Pei, Zhang Qijing, and Ting Jenny were elected as academicians of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, and Ouyang Zhiyun, a researcher of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was elected to the United States. Foreign academician of the National Academy of Sciences.

Some well-known scientists in artificial intelligence and computer-related fields are also listed, such as 2020 Turing Award Winner and Dragon Book Author Alfred Vaino Aho. 2018 Turing Award winner Yann LeCun was also named to last year’s new fellows.

In addition, Leonidas J. Guibas, the inventor of the data structure “red-black tree” and a professor in the Department of Computer Science of Stanford University, Toniann Pitassi, a professor at Columbia University who has made outstanding contributions to the theory of computational complexity, and the backbone of MIT CSAIL who researches the theory of computational complexity. Member Ronitt Rubinfeld, famous scholar in the field of probability theory, professor of mathematics at Stanford University Amir Dembo, etc.

Alfred Vaino Aho

Alfred Vaino Aho is the Lawrence Gussman Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, a fellow of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal Society of Canada, and a fellow of ACM, IEEE, Bell Labs, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Aho joined Columbia University’s Department of Computer Science in 1995. Before joining Columbia University, Aho was Vice President of Computational Science Research at Bell Labs, where he worked for more than 30 years. Aho is a graduate of the University of Toronto, followed by a Master’s and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science from Princeton University.

Aho has received numerous honors throughout his life, including awards such as the IEEE Johann von Neumann Medal and the NEC C&C Foundation C&C Award. In his Ph.D. dissertation, Aho created indexed grammars and nested stack automata as tools for extending the capabilities of context-free languages, but retaining many of their decidability and closure properties. Index grammars have been used to model parallel rewriting systems, especially in biological applications. While working at Bell Labs, he designed efficient regular expression and string pattern matching algorithms and implemented them in the first versions of the Unix tools egrep and fgrep. Aho is also known for co-authoring the AWK programming language with Peter J. Weinberger and Brian Kernighan (“A” stands for “Aho”).

In March 2021, Aho and Jeffrey David Ullman, professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University, were jointly awarded the 2020 Turing Award for “achievement in fundamental algorithms and theory in the implementation of programming languages.”

Leonidas J. Guibas

Leonidas J. Guibas is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University, director of the Geometric Computation Group and the backbone of the Computer Graphics and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University’s Department of Computer Science. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1976 and has worked for Xerox PARC, MIT, and DEC/SRC, and has been with Stanford University since 1984. Guibas is an ACM and IEEE Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Has been awarded the ACM Allen Newell Award for “pioneering contributions to the application of algorithms to all disciplines of computer science.” He is also the recipient of the ICCV Helmholtz Award and the DoD Vennevar Bush Faculty Fellowship.

Guibas learnt from Turing Award winner Donald Knuth,He is the inventor of the famous data structure “red-black tree” and many other famous algorithms. His algorithmic research involves detection, modeling, argumentation, rendering, and physical world control. Guibas has a wide range of research interests, including computational geometry, geometric modeling, computer graphics, computer vision, sensor networks, robotics, and discrete algorithms, and has achieved impressive research results in these areas.

Toniann Pitassi

Toniann Pitassi is the Jeffrey L. and Brenda Bleustein Professor of Engineering at Columbia University, IAS (Institute for Advanced Study) Visiting Professor, and Chair of the Bell Research Centre at the University of Toronto. Pitassi earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Penn State University and then went to the University of Toronto for his Ph.D. After her Ph.D., she did two years of postdoctoral research at UC San Diego and two years as an assistant professor (joint appointment in mathematics and computer science) at the University of Pittsburgh. For the next four years, she taught in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Arizona. He taught at the University of Toronto from 2001 until joining Columbia University in 2021.

Pitassi specializes inComputational complexity theory, especially proof complexity. Research addresses: computational limitations, circuit complexity, proof complexity, and communication complexity. Her research contributions in this area include the exponential lower bound of Frege’s proof of the pigeon hole principle, the exponential lower bound of the tangent plane method applied to the proposition generated by the maximum clique problem, the use of the Davis-Putnam algorithm to solve the sub-exponential of random instances of the same density Upper bound and so on. In 2018, she was selected as an ACM Fellow “for contributions to research and education in the field of computational and proof complexity.” In 2021, she received the EATCS (European Association for Theoretical Computer Science) award for her “fundamental and broad contributions to the field of computational complexity”. Additionally, she is interested in mathematical models for privacy-preserving computing and non-discriminatory machine learning.

Ronitt Rubinfeld

Ronitt Rubinfeld is Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, a core member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), an ACM Fellow, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Previously worked at NEC Research Laboratory, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Rubinfeld received his Ph.D. in 1991 from the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Manuel Blum. She previously earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Michigan. Before coming to MIT, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and Hebrew University. In 1992, she joined the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University, where she received the ONR Young Investigator Award, the Sloan Research Award, and the Cornell School of Engineering Teaching Award.

Her main research area is computational theory, includingStochastic and Sublinear Time Algorithmsexplore the question of what can be understood from a small amount of data.

Amir Dembo

Amir Dembo is an Israeli-American mathematician, Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Stanford University, and Marjorie Mhoon Fair Professor of Quantitative Science. Dembo received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Technion in 1980. In 1986, he obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering under the supervision of Prof. David Malah with a dissertation titled “Design of Digital FIR Filter Arrays”. Dembo has taught at Stanford University since 1990.

Dembo’s research interests include probability theory and stochastic processes, large deviation theory, stochastic matrix spectral theory, random walks, and interacting particle systems.

Hollis Cline

Hollis Cline is Director of the Dorris Center for Neuroscience at the Scripps Research Institute in California, Hahn Professor of Neuroscience, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, President of the Society for Neuroscience, and Member of the Advisory Board of the National Eye Institute, National Neurological Disorders and Stroke Member of the Institute Advisory Board and the NIH Brain Multicommittee Working Group.

Cline received a BA in Biology from Bryn Mawr College in 1977. He received his PhD in Neurobiology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985. In 1989, she joined Richard W. Tsien’s laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University Medical Center. Shortly thereafter, she was appointed a faculty member in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Iowa School of Medicine. In 1994, she moved to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as the Marie Robertson Professor of Neurobiology, where she served as research director from 2002 to 2006, during which time she received the National Institutes of Health Dean’s Pioneer Award. Beginning in 2008, Cline served as head of the Department of Neuroscience at the Scripps Research Institute. In 2012, Cline was selected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for “pioneering research into how sensory experience affects the development of brain structure and function, and for providing generous national and international consulting services to neuroscience” . She was awarded the Neuroscience Society Mika Salpeter Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019.

Cline is known for studying how sensory experiences affect brain development and plasticity. Her research focuses on the impact of visual experience on the development of the visual system, involving topographic map formation, neurogenesis, synapse formation and plasticity, mechanisms of neuronal development and brain circuit assembly. Cline’s research shows that a variety of molecular and cellular mechanisms that affect synaptic stability will ultimately affect brain connectivity and function. Recent research by Cline found that exosomes are involved in the development of neurons and brain circuits.

Reference link:

http://www.nasonline.org/news-and-multimedia/news/2022-nas-election.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amir_Dembo

https://geometry.stanford.edu/member/guibas/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toniann_Pitassi

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronitt_Rubinfeld