Turing Award Winners

[Doctor Q]

The 2022 Turing Award winner is Bob Metcalfe, who invented Ethernet in 1973 while working at Xerox PARC.

He worked with DEC, Intel, and Xerox to standardize the technology, creating what became today's IEEE 802 standards for network communications.

In 1979 he founded 3Com to commercialize Ethernet use.

It's estimated that there are 7 billion Ethernet ports worldwide.

 

[Doctor Q]

The 2023 Turing Award winner is Avi Wigderson, for his work in theoretical computer science. In particular, he was the first to prove that probabilistic polynomial time algorithms can be made fully deterministic, without the need for the use of random numbers. It was a revolutionary conclusion at the time.

 

[Doctor Q]

The 2024 Turing Award goes to Andrew Barto from the University of Massachusetts and Richard Sutton from the University of Alberta, for pioneering work in reinforcement learning, the process by which an agent (think AI engine) improves decision-making through a reward feedback loop.

AI has come to the forefront in computer science today, but they came up with both the theory and the algorithms for reinforcement learning way back in the 1980s.