Juliana Freire, Dennis Shasha honored by the Association for Computing Machinery

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) has honored Juliana Freire, professor of computer science and engineering at NYU Tandon and Dennis Shasha, associate director of NYU WIRELESS at NYU Tandon, with the 2020 Contributions Award.

Shasha, a Julius Silver Professor of computer science at the Courant Institute of New York University, and Freire, a faculty member of the Visualization Imaging and Data Analysis Center (VIDA) at NYU Tandon, were among six researchers who received the award, which recognizes innovative work in the data management community to encourage scientific reproducibility of ACM publications. Reproducibility was introduced at the 2008 SIGMOD Conference and since then has influenced how the community approaches experimental evaluation. It has also influenced similar efforts within ACM. Others recognized include Philippe Bonnet, Stratos Idreos, Stefan Manegold, and Ioana Manolescu.

Freire, who holds an appointment in the Courant Institute for Mathematical Science, not only made fundamental contributions to data management methods and tools for computational reproducibility, but has also been active in many efforts to increase the adoption of reproducibility best practices in science. She has also served as a member of the National Academies Committee on Reproducibility and Replicability in Science. 

In 2017, Freire became the first woman chair of the SIGMOD. She is a council member of the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC). She has published over 200 technical papers (including 8 award-winning papers), several open-source systems, and is an inventor of 12 U.S. patents. She is an ACM Fellow and a recipient of an NSF CAREER, two IBM Faculty awards, and a Google Faculty Research award. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, Sloan Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, W. M. Keck Foundation, Google, Amazon, AT&T Research, Microsoft Research, Yahoo! and IBM.

Shasha works on meta algorithms for machine learning; with biologists on pattern discovery for network inference; with computational chemists on algorithms for protein design; with physicists and financial people on algorithms for time series; on clocked computation for DNA computing; and on computational reproducibility. He has written six books of puzzles about a mathematical detective named Dr. Ecco, a biography about great computer scientists, and a book about the future of computing. He has co-authored over 85 journal papers, 80 conference papers, and 25 patents. He has written the puzzle column for various publications including Scientific American, Dr. Dobb’s Journal, and currently the Communications of the ACM. He is a fellow of the ACM and an INRIA International Chair.