Talia Ringer, Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, was awarded the Distinguished Service Award by ACM SIGPLAN. Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist of Google DeepMind and Google Research, noted on Twitter that Ringer has “an absolutely incredible dedication to many different research communities, to mentoring new researchers and to bringing people together.”
Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist of Google DeepMind and Google Research, noted on Twitter that Ringer has “an absolutely incredible dedication to many different research communities, to mentoring new researchers and to bringing people together.”
SIGPLAN-M is the program that Ringer founded and chaired for two years, and one reason they received the award. The Computing Connections Fellowship program they started was also cited in the awards presentation. The Distinguished Service Award is usually given to senior researchers, which was noted as unusual, but justified by Ringer’s service to the community.
ACM SIGPLAN gives the Distinguished Service Award to recognize contributions to the Programming Languages Community. The award recognizes contributions to ACM SIGPLAN, its conferences, publications, or its local activities. The SIGPLAN Long-Term Mentoring Committee (SIGPLAN-M) organizes an international long-term mentoring program for programming languages researchers that matches mentors with mentees from different institutions for mentoring relationships that last at least a year.
Ringer responded that “I really mean it when I say this means more to me than any research award I could ever get. The community work is just so much bigger than any one person's research could ever be.” You can see a video of their acceptance speech here.
The award carries a $2500 prize, $1000 of which Ringer donated to Equality Florida since the conference was held in Florida, a state that is passing laws that discriminate against transgender people.
The 2023 PLDI conference was co-located with other workshops and conferences in the Federated Computing Research Conference (FCRC), where Illinois Computer Science students and faculty actively participated.