Bell Labs’ Al Aho and Jeffrey Ullman honored with the prestigious Turing Award
Two pioneering Bell Labs researchers, Alfred Aho and Jeffrey Ullman, have been named recipients of the 2020 ACM A.M. Turing award, the most prestigious honor in the field of computer science. This is the Nokia Bell Labs’ fifth Turing Award, recognizing its ongoing innovation in computing, software, AI and machine learning.
In announcing the award, the Association of Computer Machinery (ACM) lauded Aho and Ullman for their key contributions to programming-language theory and implementation, and their foundational work on compilers, which are fundamental in translating higher-level programming languages into lower-level code executed by nearly every program today.
“While countless researchers and practitioners have contributed to these technologies, the work of Aho and Ullman has been especially influential,” ACM President Gabriele Kotsis said. “They have helped us to understand the theoretical foundations of algorithms and to chart the course for research and practice in compilers and programming language design. Aho and Ullman have been thought leaders since the early 1970s, and their work has guided generations of programmers and researchers up to the present day.”
Aho and Ullman began collaborating at Bell Labs in the 1967 after they received their PhDs at Princeton University. Here they did their early work developing efficient algorithms for analyzing and translating programming languages. Ullman left the organization in 1969 to pursue a full-time career in academia, while Aho stayed on for a long and fruitful tenure at Bell Labs. In 1980, Aho was appointed Head of the Computing Principles Research Department. From 1987 to 1991 he was Director of the Computing Science Research Center. Those were exhilarating decades in computer science at Bell Labs. Aho was part of the team that invented the Unix operating system and developed the C and C++ programming languages. Aho himself was co-inventor of the AWK programming language, along with Peter Weinberger and Brian Kernighan. In 1997 Aho became Associate Research Vice President, Communications Sciences Research, at Bell Labs. He retired in 2002.
Though Aho and Ullman’s time together at Bell Labs was short, that initial stint kicked off a long collaboration. The two, quite literally, wrote the books on several areas of computer science. Their textbooks The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms (1974, Co-authored by John Hopcroft) and Principles of Compiler Design (1977) are classics in their fields and have been studied by budding computer scientists for decades. They co-authored many other textbooks and research papers and continued to jointly influence the development of computer programming well into the new millennium.
Today Aho is the Lawrence Gussman Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Columbia University, while Ullman is the Stanford W. Ascherman Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University.
Though retired from Nokia Bell Labs, Aho has remained a close member of the Bell Labs family. He participates in software-team project reviews and ideation sessions and is a frequent presence at Bell Labs events and symposia. Aho has consistently served as a judge for the Bell Labs Prize, which recognizes outstanding innovation from some of the brightest minds in the world. In 2019 at Unix50, a series of events celebrating the operating system’s 50th birthday, Aho delivered a talk on the continued impact of Unix as the world’s information infrastructure evolves. You can watch the video here.
Aho and Ullman join a growing roster of Nokia Bell Labs alumni honored with the Turing Award – often referred to as “The Nobel Prize of Computing.” Yann LeCun won the 2018 award for his work in deep neural networks. Robert Tarjan won the 1986 award for his work on algorithms and data structures. Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson shared the award in 1983, recognizing their invention of UNIX. And Richard Hamming took home the 1968 award for his work on numerical methods, automatic coding systems, and error-detecting and error-correcting codes.
Featured photo: Al Aho
