Prakash Panangaden, a professor of computer science, has been named a Fellow by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Panangden was honoured “for making continuous state systems amenable to logical and computational treatment.”
The new Fellows were announced on January 13.
With a research career that has spanned computer science, mathematics and physics, Panangaden is interested in mathematical foundations of machine learning. He has worked on bisimulation, metrics and approximation for Markov processes. Panangaden has also worked on logics for probabilistic systems, Stone duality for Markov processes and programming languages. His recent activity includes a quantitative extension of equational logic and semantics for a stochastic lambda-calculus. In other recent work, he and his collaborators developed a notion of approximate minimization of weighted finite automata and bisimulation for such automata. This has led to current activity in automata learning. Past research activities include quantum information theory, concurrent programming semantics, modal logic and category theory.
Top one per cent
Panangaden, who joined McGill in 1990, was one of 95 newly-named ACM Fellows recognized for wide-ranging and fundamental contributions in areas including artificial intelligence, cloud computing, computer graphics, computational biology, data science, human-computer interaction, software engineering, theoretical computer science, and virtual reality, among other areas.
The ACM Fellows program recognizes the top one per cent of ACM Members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community. Fellows are nominated by their peers, with nominations reviewed by a distinguished selection committee.
Pivotal contributions to transformational technologies
“This year our task in selecting the 2020 Fellows was a little more challenging, as we had a record number of nominations from around the world,” said ACM President Gabriele Kotsis. “The 2020 ACM Fellows have demonstrated excellence across many disciplines of computing. These men and women have made pivotal contributions to technologies that are transforming whole industries, as well as our personal lives. We fully expect that these new ACM Fellows will continue in the vanguard in their respective fields.”
The contributions of the 2020 Fellows run the gamut of the computing field – including algorithms, networks, computer architecture, robotics, distributed systems, software development, wireless systems, and web science – to name a few.
Additional information about the 2020 ACM Fellows, as well as previously named ACM Fellows, is available through the ACM Fellows site.