Computer Scientist Keshav Pingali Receives Lifetime Achievement Award for Programing Languages

Keshav Pingali, professor of computer science at The University of Texas at Austin, has been given the Programming Languages Achievement Award by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN).

Pingali, who holds the W. A. “Tex” Moncrief, Jr. Chair in Distributed and Grid Computing and is a faculty member of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, works in programming languages and compiler technology for program understanding, optimization and parallelization. His current research interests are methodologies and tools for programming multicore processors, with a focus on irregular applications from domains like graphics, social networks and data mining.

The annual award recognizes significant and lasting contributions to the field of programming languages and includes a monetary award. It was presented at SIGPLAN’s Programming Language Design and Implementation conference in June in Copenhagen.

Last year, Pingali was announced as the winner of the Ken Kennedy Award for High Performance and Parallel Computing by the Association for Computer Machinery for substantial contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and substantial community service and the IEEE CS Charles Babbage Award.