ACM'S A.M. Turing Award, computing's highest honor, goes to Manuel Blum of University of California, Berkeley.

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 20, 1995--Considered the Nobel Prize of Computing, the A. M. Turing Award of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), will be given to distinguished computer scientist, Manuel Blum, of the University of California, Berkeley. The award will be presented to Blum at a special awards ceremony during the kick off of ACM's yearlong 50th anniversary celebration, February 14-18, 1996 in Philadelphia.

Blum was honored with the Turing Award "in recognition of his contributions to the foundation of computational complexity theory and its applications to cryptography and program checking."

Starting from his early work on the inherent limitations of computing devices, Blum's research has developed around a single unifying theme: finding positive, practical consequences of living in a world where all computational resources are bounded. Blum shows that secure business transactions, pseudo-random number generation, and program checking are all possible precisely because all computational devices are resource bounded.

Blum is one of the founders of computational complexity theory, a field that is central to theoretical computer science, and one which deals with measuring the difficulty of performing computations. His work on machine-independent complexity yields a theory of computational cost that is relevant also to practical problems. Cryptographic protocols which are used in the transmission of sensitive information are secure because they can be shown to be difficult to break. Thus, an intruder cannot determine the information in a cryptographically encoded message without going through an inordinately complex computation that would be prohibitively costly and time consuming to perform. For computer programs it is very difficult to develop perfectly error-free programs. In this area Blum has shown how his techniques can be applied to make programs more reliable, and to check their results. Since this work is very fundamental one can expect that it will find application to many other practical problems, as well.

"Manuel Blum is a profound thinker," said ACM President Stuart H. Zweben, chairman of the department of computer and information science at Ohio State University, "his seminal work, insights and approaches have brought about new avenues of research in the area of computational complexity and established foundations for what people can compute. Furthermore, his work has influenced other Turing Award winners to a significant degree."

The ACM A. M. Turing Award is given annually for technical achievements in the field of computing which are deemed by a jury of leading professionals to be of lasting and significant importance to the computing community. It is accompanied by a prize of $25,000 contributed by AT&T.

Dr. Blum is University of California at Berkeley's Arthur J. Chick Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computing Sciences, a Department in which he has served since 1968. Dr. Blum was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1938 and began his academic career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D degrees. His mentors at MIT were Richard Schoenwald, Warren S. McCulloch, Hartley Rogers Jr. and Marvin Minsky. Dr. Blum is renowned for his work on computational complexity, automata theory, inductive inference, cryptography and program result-checking. During his career, Dr. Blum has received numerous awards, published 47 technical papers and advised 26 Ph.D. students.

ACM, founded in 1947, is an 85,000 member international scientific and educational organization dedicated to advancing the art, science, engineering and application of information technology. ACM serves both professional and public interests by fostering the open interchange of information and by promoting the highest professional and ethical standards. This is accomplished through its many publications, conferences, special interest groups, chapters and network communications.

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