ACM and Infosys Foundation Announce Winner of New Award Honoring Contemporary Contributions in Computer Science

New York and Bangalore, India (ots/PRNewswire) -

- US$150,000 Prize to Stanford's Koller for Groundbreaking Work
in Making Computers Intelligent

ACM (the Association for Computing Machinery) announced today
that Daphne Koller, a professor at Stanford University, has been
awarded the first-ever ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in Computing
Sciences. Koller, 39, is being recognized for her innovative approach
to Artificial Intelligence (AI) that allows computers to reason and
learn about the world from real-world data. By combining the
previously incompatible tools of logic and probability that are the
basic principles of intelligent reasoning, she created a new field of
learning that has transformed the way computers can process vast
amounts of diverse, uncertain, often-conflicting data to solve
complex real-world problems.

This new award, announced in August 2007, recognizes personal
contributions by young scientists and system developers to a
contemporary innovation that exemplifies the greatest recent
achievements in the computing field. Financial support for the
US$150,000 award is provided by an endowment from the Infosys
Foundation.

"Professor Koller's advances have been productive not only for
computer science, but in a wide variety of applications that use
computing to advance society in numerous ways," said Stuart I.
Feldman, President of ACM. "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. By using her models and
algorithms to integrate small bits and pieces of data in systematic
ways that produce stronger conclusions, her work offers a powerful
way to think about the world. She is an ideal choice for the first
recipient of this award, so generously donated by Infosys," said
Feldman, who is vice president of Engineering at Google Inc.

Koller's research aims to build intelligent systems using
techniques that underlie rational reasoning and learning. It unifies
ideas from relational logic, which involves reasoning about objects
and the relationships between them, and probability, which provides
tools for dealing with uncertainty. Her synthesis of logic and
probability is known as probabilistic relational modeling. She has
also developed new mathematical and computational tools that allow us
to learn from complex data the probabilistic rules that model the
world, and to use these rules to reach strong conclusions about the
world.

"The ACM-Infosys Foundation Award recognizes young researchers
who are currently making sizeable contributions to their fields and
furthering computer science innovation. The goal is to identify
scientifically-sound breakthrough research with potentially broad
implications, and encourage the recipients to further their
research," said S. Gopalakrishnan, CEO and managing director, Infosys
Technologies. "Daphne Koller is a shining example of a pioneering
researcher whose multi-disciplinary work in artificial intelligence
is enabling computers to operate at a new level and solve complex
problems spanning epidemiology, robotics and language processing
systems."

Koller also heads Stanford's undergraduate research program in
computer science (CS), which she initiated in 2001. It provides
summer research internships to encourage students to get involved in
CS research with faculty mentors early in their careers. To date,
nearly three hundred students have benefited from this program. In
2003, Koller was awarded the Cox Medal for excellence in fostering
undergraduate research at Stanford.

In 2004, Koller was named a MacArthur Fellow. In 2001, she
received the Computer and Thought Award from the International Joint
Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), and in 1999, she was
awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and
Engineers.

Koller has served the computing community in a variety of
professional roles, including Program Chair for the 2007 Conference
on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), and the 2001
Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence. She was
associate editor for the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
and Machine Learning Journal. She is the author of more than 150
peer-reviewed articles in publications that span Science, Nature
Genetics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Machine Learning, and
Games and Economic Behavior.

Koller received a B.Sc. in mathematics and a M.Sc. degree in
computer science from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. She
earned a Ph.D. degree from Stanford and was a postdoctoral fellow at
the University of California, Berkeley. She joined the Stanford
faculty in 1995.

ACM will present the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award at the annual
ACM Awards Banquet on June 21, 2008, in San Francisco, CA. For more
information, click on http://www.acm.org/membership/infosys_award.

About ACM

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery http://www.acm.org,
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. ACM
strengthens the computing profession's collective voice through
strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and
recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional
growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long
learning, career development, and professional networking.

About The Infosys Foundation

Established in 1996, the Infosys Foundation is the philanthropic
arm of Infosys Technologies Ltd. and has the sole objective of
fulfilling the social responsibility of the company by creating
opportunities and working toward a more equitable society. The
Infosys Foundation has made effective strides in the areas of
healthcare, education, social rehabilitation, and the arts. The
company contributes up to one percent of its profit to the foundation
each year.

About Infosys Technologies

Infosys (Nasdaq: INFY) defines, designs and delivers IT-enabled
business solutions that help Global 2000 companies win in a Flat
World. These solutions focus on providing strategic differentiation
and operational superiority to clients. With Infosys, clients are
assured of a transparent business partner, world-class processes,
speed of execution and the power to stretch their IT budget by
leveraging the Global Delivery Model that Infosys pioneered. Infosys
has over 91,000 employees in over 40 offices worldwide. Infosys is
part of the NASDAQ-100 Index. For more information, visit
http://www.infosys.com.

Web site: http://www.acm.org
http://www.infosys.com

ots Originaltext: ACM
Im Internet recherchierbar: http://www.presseportal.de

Contact:
Virginia Gold of ACM, +1-212-626-0505, vgold@acm.org; or Peter
McLaughlin of Infosys Technologies, Ltd., +1-213-268-9363,
peter_mclaughlin@infosys.com