By IANS,
Bangalore : Stanford University professor Daphne Koller has been chosen for the first ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in computing sciences for her innovative approach to artificial intelligence (AI) that allows computers to reason and learn about the world from real-time data, the IT bellwether announced here Monday.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field’s challenges.
Infosys Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Infosys Technologies Ltd, was set up to fulfil the company’s social responsibility by creating opportunities and working toward a more equitable society.
Koller, 39, has won the award, carrying a cash prize of $150,000 (Rs.6 million), for her groundbreaking work in making computers intelligent, the company said.
“By combining incompatible tools of logic and probability, Koller created a new field of learning that has transformed the way computers can process vast amounts of complicated data to solve complex real-world problems. Her research has been used as a framework to solve problems in such diverse fields as computational biology and epidemiology, language processing systems, robotics, and computer perception in understanding images,” ACM president Stuart I. Feldman noted.
“Koller is a shining example of a pioneering researcher whose multi-disciplinary work in AI is enabling computers to operate at a new level and solve complex problems spanning epidemiology, robotics and language processing systems,” Infosys CEO S. Gopalakrishnan said.
Koller graduated in mathematics and did her MSc in computer science from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. She earned her PhD degree from Stanford and was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. She joined the Stanford faculty in 1995.
The award will be presented to Koller June 21 at the annual ACM awards banquet in San Francisco, California.